AI is everywhere, and in creative circles, it stirs strong feelings. Some writers are curious. Others resist. Many feel a mix of excitement and fear.
The questions are familiar: Will it replace us? Is it cheating to use it? Can it help me write, or will it hurt my voice?
The short answer is this: AI is not a replacement for your writing. But it may be a useful tool for your process.
What AI Can’t Do
Across the literary world, there’s agreement on AI’s limits. It can reproduce patterns and structures, but it rarely captures the lived, human texture that makes a story compelling. It can get the “beats” of a story, but it often misses the voice and resonance that draw readers in.
Push it toward creativity and it tends to lean on clichés, tidy plot turns, or resolutions that feel too neat. In other words, it can imitate, but it struggles to originate.
And yet, writers are finding ways to use it as a kind of support, which is where things get interesting.
How Writers Use AI Without Losing Their Voice
Writers experimenting with AI often treat it less as a co-author and more as a mirror. When something feels off in a scene you can ask AI for an opinion. The suggestions won’t always solve the problem, but they can spark insight or help clarify what isn’t working.
Used in this way, AI reflects possibilities back to you, but the final choices are yours.
Writers report using it to:
- Brainstorm structural options or character arcs
- Track logistical details, like the names of cities or characters
- Organize research or timelines
- Condense messy notes into bullet points
- Offer second opinions when something feels “off”
In all of these examples, the writer is still the one making the creative decisions.
Guarding Your Voice
Your voice as a writer consists of the specific ways in which you tell stories. Your voice isn’t just style. It’s your fingerprint. It’s the rhythm of your sentences, the way you notice the world, the lens of your lived experience. Voice is what readers connect with most deeply and AI can’t reproduce that.
The simplest safeguarding your voice is to keep AI in a supporting role. Use it for research, organization, or logistics, but never for the sentences you want your readers to hear in their heads as they read (or listen to) your work. If you do experiment with generated text, treat it as raw clay to reshape completely, not as finished work.
Personally, the idea of rewriting banal pages spit out by AI sounds positively awful. I love the raw creativity that flows onto the page when I’m working on a first draft. And when it comes time to edit, I much prefer to edit something I wrote because I have a sense of what I was going for, even if it hasn’t landed just right yet. AI can’t help with any of that.
Let It Be a Tool, Not a Crutch
Most writers and editors agree on one point: AI shouldn’t write your book. (And legally speaking, there are still a lot of grey areas around the question of whether you can copyright a book written by AI.)
But it might help you finish it. It might reduce friction, give you perspective when you’re stuck, or handle background details so you can stay immersed in the heart of your story.
So if you’re wondering how to approach AI, the answer is this: use it thoughtfully. Sparingly. With intention. And always in service of the story only you can tell.
Because at the end of the day, no algorithm can replace your voice.
Do You Use AI?
I would love to know: How are you navigating AI in your writing life? Has it genuinely lifted your process (brainstorming, timelines, messy notes) or has it threatened your voice? Share a win, a misstep, or a boundary you’ve drawn. If you’ve found a prompt, practice, or personal rule that keeps your voice intact, tell us about it. And if you’re still unsure, name the question you’re holding.
Let’s compare notes. Together we can learn what works, where the risks are, and how to build guardrails that help us protect the human heart of storytelling.
Oh its so tricky.
I started my current (debut) novel determined not to get sucked into using AI. Then, struggling for a character name, I asked AI to comment on a list of potential names for my antagonist. And I asked for its own list for a charterer with a set of particular identifiers. Both times AI provided useful feedback. And now I have a fresh feeling name for a tech-bro billionaire.
The ‘collaboration’ with AI felt slippery-slopey at first, like I was conspiring with the enemy. But its just a tool.
I use it often as a synonym provider, for example. And I love the idea of getting it to do the hard graft of beta-reader summarisation (see post by Samantha), another example of a tool well used 🙂
Love this reflection. That slippery slope feeling is common, and you’re right that it is just a tool. Congrats on landing that tech-bro billionaire name. 🙂
I really only use it as a sophisticated thesaurus and haven’t found it very useful beyond that. But I am also very wary of uploading my manuscript, and of AI as a whole.
One exception was having it summarize the meandering transcripts of the conversations I had with my beta readers. That would have taken me hours and it did a good job of pulling the major points of our discussions out, so I have a sort of checklist for my next edit/rewrite.
Hi Samantha, how are you? Thanks for sharing this. I love how you are protecting your core pages while still letting a tool do the grunt work on those beta reader transcripts; turning hours of sifting into a clear checklist is exactly the kind of targeted, low risk use that serves the work. If you want a little more mileage without sharing any manuscript text, you can feed in de-identified notes to shape a concise revision plan, sanity check timeline math from just dates and ages, or request compact synonym clusters to spot echo words. All of that keeps your voice offline and your attention on the writing itself.
In my creative writing, I use AI for spell checking, grammar, repeated words, etc. I also use the AI voice in Microsoft Word to read my work aloud so I can catch any typos or inconsistencies. But that’s the extent of it.
I hear many writers use AI for developmental editing, which feels like a slippery slope to me. AI is not human, therefore it cannot provide a human’s reaction to the work. Human reaction to the work is essential. If you’re a writer intending for human readers to buy and read your work, why would you trust the work to anyone but human readers?
Thanks, Cate. I really appreciate your boundary. Mechanical checks and read-aloud are exactly where AI shines—it can catch the small stuff that our eyes skim past after the tenth read. But when it comes to developmental feedback, I’m with you completely. That’s human work.
AI can flag patterns or offer alternatives, but it doesn’t feel tension, or subtext, or empathy. It doesn’t know what makes a scene ache or a sentence land. Only human readers can do that.