No to AI as a Writer

I have always been a writer, so you would expect me to welcome AI with open arms. It can draft blog posts and stories, write my emails, build marketing copy, even come up with a snappy tagline. But if I let it, I would be cutting out the most important part of writing, the act of doing it. Much of writing happens when you are not writing at all. It is the time your brain spends turning ideas over in the background, pulling connections from experiences that seem unrelated. Finding patterns is what our brains do best, and it works best when left alone. If you have ever had an “aha” moment while washing dishes or reaching for a book, you know what I mean. AI, by contrast, learns from finished work, static words that came out of someone else’s messy creative process. But writing, even a simple email, is iteration. You write, delete, rewrite, choose, reject, start, and stop. It is like shaping clay, small touches, tearing it down when it is not right, starting again. That constant reworking is what makes good writing good. AI cannot pick it up from published text, because nobody publishes their hundred discarded drafts. It only revises when I tell it to, which means writing a better prompt, then revising that prompt. And what happens when I ask AI to write the prompt for me? Letting AI gather your words is like taking the pencil out of an artist’s hand. Give that artist a screen and VR gloves and the picture might even turn out well, but it will not feel like pencil on paper. Something gets lost, some stubbornly human spark that goes beyond the mechanics of drawing. You have heard the phrase “a turn of phrase.” It is when a writer lands on a sentence that grabs the reader, moves them, maybe even prompts a revelation. AI rarely gives you that, because AI is built for utility. It treats writing as a delivery truck and sands off the complexity that makes prose worth reading. Reading is as visual as it is intellectual, sentence length, word choice, punctuation, and paragraph size all matter. Writing should suit its audience, but that does not mean readers should not be challenged. If we assume everyone reads at a fourth-grade level and write only for that, how will we ever learn whether they wanted more.  Do not get me wrong, I am not calling for a ban. A system that can chew through huge, scattered sources of data faster than I can makes a lot of sense. I shall ask AI to summarize a long report or spot patterns, and I am glad for the head start. That might sound hypocritical: handing over the analytical part of my brain but guarding the creative part. But when AI analyzes something, I am still in the loop. I check its conclusions, and if I disagree, I dig into the data myself. When I hand over the writing, I lose everything that happens in my head while I do it. A rough AI start that I then rewrite might be a fair use, but only as a head start. Writing is complicated. An email is not a novel, and AI may suit some kinds of writing better than others. But at bottom, writing is the expression of human thought, and no system can do that for you. I suspect people turn to AI because they do not want to do the work. Putting thoughts into words precise enough for a reader to understand is hard, and if something else can carry that load, they can spend their energy elsewhere.

But where is the fun in that? Finishing a novel, even a terrible first draft, is an accomplishment because of what you pour into it, your time, energy, creativity, and stubbornness. The result is deeply personal. It carries your voice, voices opinions you did not know you had, and gives shape to your memories and feelings. Yes, it is usually imperfect. But swapping that imperfection for thoughts a machine borrowed from other people is not an upgrade. Even if the output is better in some ways, it is not yours. It is not your accomplishment, and it does not sound like you. Everyone can tell a great story, and everyone faces a steep learning curve to do it. Riding an escalator past that climb cheapens the journey and quietly convinces us we could not have made it without one. There is a practical problem, too. Work produced entirely by AI tends to look stale, over polished, and flat, because there is no real style behind it. And since it can be mass-produced with almost no effort, it is flooding writing spaces, and readers are starting to notice. Not long ago, writer Joanna Macijauskas went viral with a tweet saying she wanted AI to do her laundry and dishes so she would have more time to write, not the other way around. Many creatives cheered. Others sneered that she didn’t understand how AI works, or that she objected only when AI came for creative work, not cleaners’ jobs. There may be some truth in that. I sometimes catch myself seeing AI as a threat mostly when it moves into a field where I excel. But you can also read her tweet as a simple personal choice, why hand over the work we actually enjoy? I understand why people use tools like Claude or ChatGPT.  I, though, love building a story’s structure, shuffling chapters until they click, and rewriting sentences until they flow. Why would I give that away? There is another reason. As a writer, you strive for a voice that is entirely your own and a book that matches the vision in your head. The more you lean on AI, the harder that gets. Because these models are trained on such a vast range of text, they tend to sound like the average person. Andrej Karpathy, one of the best-known names in AI, put it neatly in November 2024, “think of it less as “asking an AI” and more as asking “the average data labeler” on the internet. Then there is the ethics. Most generative models were trained on huge amounts of copyrighted writing without the authors’ permission. Some have called the current AI boom the greatest art heist in history. The Author’s Guild has urged tech giants like Meta and Google to stop, and authors such as John Grisham and Elif Shafak have joined a lawsuit against OpenAI. Writing is not about efficiency. It is about exploring ideas, questioning things, and discovering yourself through a story. Every writer has to decide how much AI to let in, whether as inspiration, co-author, editor, or proofreader. When I write my columns, I use none of them. That is where I draw the line.