Despite what you may have heard from the hype mill, writing with AI may not be a good thing for you, especially if you are a student or a beginner writer. If you write with AI, you open yourself up to professional and personal dangers that may have long-term impact on your career and perhaps even on your ability to give expression to your ideas and thoughts.

In this article, I am going to give you a complete breakdown of why writing fiction with AI might be a mistake that you probably want to avoid if you care about your writing career.

Anyone who reads for pleasure will tell you that they do not want their books written by machine learning algorithms. Readers want stories and poetry and art from writers — real flesh-and-blood human beings like themselves.

Even when they do like something made using AI, as evidenced by this study published in Scientific Reports, the appreciation disappears as soon as they learn the truth. It is possible for AI-generated works to resemble human-made art, but those who like art like it because it was made by humans. Take that away and you are left with a hollow feeling, as if you just fell in love with nothing.

The only way you can get away with writing using AI is by lying to your audience. If you are a writer with any kind of audience, you don’t need me to tell you how precious your relationship with them is and how silly you would have to be to jeopardise it by lying to them. If you wouldn’t pretend that you wrote something someone else wrote, why would you pretend to be the writer of text generated by a chatbot? And if you think your readers will not feel any different about your work even if they knew you created it using AI, go ahead and ask them, but be sure to wear a helmet.

People love books, yes. But what they truly fall in love with is the mind, the life, and the experiences behind it. To forget that in pursuit of “write books faster with ChatGPT” would be a monumental mistake for any young writer.

Influencers and hustle bros might be completely sold on the revolutionary potential of generative AI as far as creating content is concerned, but among professional writers and artists, there is widespread agreement that generative AI companies have stolen from them and are presently in the process of launching an assault on culture affecting art, writing, and publishing.

If you are a young writer looking to get traditionally published, you should know that many magazine editors and publishers to whom you might submit your short stories explicitly forbid the use of AI. They not only reject submissions created with AI, they even blacklist writers, making sure they will never be published by them in the future.

Here is what science fiction magazine Clarkesworld says on its submissions page in a clearly marked, big grey box:

They’re not the only ones. You can find similar sentiments in the submission guidelines of Uncanny Magazine:

Beneath Ceaseless Skies clarifies its position in a little more detail, emphasising the importance of voice and making clear what it considers to be the problem with AI-generated work:

This is by no means an exhaustive list, and it is not limited to science fiction and fantasy magazines either. Even the Author’s Guild is suing AI companies for their massive theft of intellectual property.

If you are a young writer who dreams of being part of the mainstream publishing world, use of generative AI tools might put you in all kinds of blacklists that you should not be in. Wouldn’t you rather be appreciated for your original ideas and way of expressing them?

What’s good advice for the average AI slop content creator on social media may be the exact opposite for someone whose true dream lies elsewhere. The merchant of short form video and the aspiring author swim in very different waters.

This point is actually true in more ways than one. If you are a writer, you have worked hard to build your writing muscle. You have spent endless hours on honing your craft, developing your writing voice, and creating your own style. You did all this through practice and hard work.

Now here comes a new toy that has been trained on the hard work done by millions of writers like you. Their skill was farmed using software that illegally scraped their work from all over the internet. They literally had their skills stolen by a billionaire who, much like the villain in the game Split Fiction, built a machine that stole not only ideas but also the creativity of writers who came up with those ideas.

The other way in which you will lose your skills if you choose to write with AI is similar to how you might lose your ability to run long distances by always travelling in a comfortable car.

Your years of practice has given you mental frameworks for processing problems associated with writing. You can navigate plots, process scenes, predict character behaviour in believable (and unbelievable) ways. You have a natural grip on how words flow and you know how to carve sentences and paragraphs out of raw ideas.

If you start allowing these mental tasks to be overtaken by AI, you will lose something precious. There are many who will tell you those skills have no value anymore, but these will be people who have chosen to undervalue their own humanity by convincing themselves (and others) that all they can ever be is average.

I know there is plenty of loose talk about skills not mattering anymore, but it is just that — loose talk. Amazon’s ebook catalogues are full of AI-generated slop that is badly written, thoughtlessly edited, and put out with nothing except money in mind.

Do you really want to be counted among the hordes of amateurs who are “generating” text to make money with cheap grifts or do you want to be known and acknowledged for your skills and imagination as a human writer? And before you answer that question, keep in mind that if you choose the convenience of these generic tools over the skills you have developed through a lifetime of hard practice, you may not even have a choice when it comes to what people will see you as.

It is all about what you aspire towards — excellence or mediocrity. I want you to be nothing less than the best — a writer whose work will change the world and be remembered for generations after they are dead. And that work is not going to come out of a cheap ChatGPT prompt.

Let me share a personal experience with you. When AI tools first appeared before the public as tools, I too was blown away by all they could do. I tried to “write” using chatbots like ChatGPT and Claude. I was even impressed by the output they gave me. But beyond a point something strange started to happen. I didn’t like what I was doing.

It felt icky!

I am not sure how best to describe it, but it felt like… plagiarism.

Even though I was being told by the makers of the tools and everyone around me that this was an okay thing to do, it just felt wrong. It didn’t matter that I had paid for the tool, it didn’t matter that I didn’t need anyone’s permission to copy the chatbot’s output and claim it as my own work. The icky feeling inside me took over everything else. I deleted all I had “produced”, ended my paid subscription with the AI website, and removed all traces of the AI “art” I had posted on various social media platforms.

I don’t know if I can expect you to have a similar reaction to writing with AI, but I believe that it is a healthy reaction.

You do feel good about writing, don’t you? Even if you are one of those writers who enjoy having written more than the act of writing itself, you do like the feeling of having written something, of having brought something into the world that was not here before. I am sure you like having contributed to the pool of human culture.

If nothing else, I am sure you take some pride in the work you put in. That is the artist’s pride, the artisan’s pride, the craftsman’s pride. It’s a little hard to describe but anyone who makes art, or is engaged in any kind of creative work, knows exactly what it feels like. It is a deep satisfaction that will never be known by those who see the process of creation as optional and want to skip to the end and have a product in their hands.

I think my icky feeling was a result of losing that satisfaction. I am a writer after all, and I know what creating something feels like. Writing with AI does not feel like that and never will, because quite frankly, it is not writing at all.

It might be unnerving as a writer to see a world moving more and more towards AI use. It might seem that human work, human labour, and human creativity have no use anymore.

But that is simply not the case.

If anything, human work matters more now than it ever did. If you are a writer worried that everyone will start reading AI-generated books and stories, I am here to tell you that your fears are exaggerated.

Sure, many will consume machine-made approximations of literature. Many will not care that the bulk of their reading material is average fair churned out by a soulless algorithmic process. Already, more than one major social network is full of AI slop content featuring AI avatars narrating AI-generated scripts in AI voices. And it seems like nobody cares.

But this is also speeding up the process of saturation.

People read for emotional connection and relatability. Those who devalue the human element will eventually come to realise that text generated using ChatGPT, no matter how easy it is to produce and publish in large amounts, cannot satisfy the need for human connection that readers crave.

In a world where your work becomes so easy that anyone can do it, why would anyone pay you to perform that task? You are probably being told that writing with AI is the way of the future, but jumping on to that bandwagon will only make you less valuable, not more.