Should Authors Use AI in Their Writing?

This is a very contentious topic. Debates rage on author forums about whether writers should use AI, particularly in its most sophisticated forms. These conversations get so heated that I’ve seen people thrown off discussion groups for being outrageously rude and saying that anybody who uses AI is not a real writer. That, of course, is nonsense.

Here are the important questions: first, will it help your writing, or will it change your voice? Second, is it ethical to use artificial intelligence in writing, particularly if you don’t disclose that fact to others? Third, should you tell people that you wrote part of your book or article with AI?

AI does change the writer’s voice, but that’s often why writers use it in the first place. They want something that sounds better than what they’ve written, and they want it to be spelled and punctuated perfectly. But if you write large portions of a book using ChatGPT or Grok, will you own that book? Amazon is facing several lawsuits from authors whose material it deemed largely AI-generated and removed from its platform. If you have written your book using a substantial amount of AI, you may not be able to copyright it, or the copyright can be violated, and the book could end up in the public domain.

What should we do? You’ll notice that I addressed whether AI would help you with writing and copyright issues, but I didn’t talk about ethics. I think that’s an individual matter. We all have to decide for ourselves when and if it is ethical to use a bot to write for us. Personally, I use various AI tools, mainly for grammar, syntax, and synonyms, and occasionally to fact-check. However, AI is not 100% accurate. It can be wrong about all kinds of things.

If you are publishing on Amazon, you need to disclose to them whether you use AI. If you are in college or university and writing essays, check school policies so you don’t get a failing grade for what you thought was a stupendous paper. Otherwise, this is a personal matter that we all have to decide for ourselves. When and how you use AI as a writer is your business.