On AI

Every era introduces new tools and new pressures for writers. AI is the newest force reshaping the landscape and efforts to eliminate the use of AI are tilting at windmills. A more productive effort is to define boundaries, intention, and clarity.

Readers deserve to know how the stories they love are made.

Writers deserve clarity about the tools shaping our industry.

All of us deserve a conversation grounded in nuance rather than broad declarations. In that spirit, here is my stance on AI and how I use it. Because transparency is the only honest response to a tool that’s already inside everything we do.

• Pirate book sites are bad. Full stop. They should be eradicated.

• LLMs should not be trained on copyrighted work without permission.

  • The fact that the publishing industry has turned a half blind eye to them for ages is how LLMs were able to crawl copyrighted work. If the sites didn’t exist, copyrighted work wouldn’t be available for training.

• AI can’t be boycotted.

  • I use AI and so do you, just perhaps not in the ways that keep you up at night.

  • Even if you never enter a prompt in the main systems, AI is incorporated into the digital landscape so every search and email uses AI.¹²³

• AI can be a viable tool for many tasks beyond text generation and writing.

  • I also build apps and have been using AI to increase the functionality of my apps for a few years.

  • My day job encourages innovate ways to incorporate AI in my workflow.

• We need ethical boundaries around acceptable use of AI in all areas, and especially in writing and publishing.

  • The choices we make about our tools shape the work we produce and the roles we occupy as creators. These are important conversations to have.

• We need new terms and roles in publishing to improve clarity around the use of AI.

  • Grammarly is a generally accepted AI tool.

  • Using AI is as a ghostwriter displaces authors from the role of “writer.” I saw one author categorize herself as the “creative director” of the work and I thought that was a fair assessment.

    • Even when someone uses a human ghost writer, in the writer community we think, “Yes, that is [person]’s book but they didn’t write it.”

  • Content book farms are bad for all of us. Defining accepted boundaries and constraints that protect human writers is more effective than wishing away AI.

The way people are using AI isn’t new. We’ve had copy editors and ghost writers and quick, cheap pulp fiction for ages. The tool is simply different, and it requires intention and guardrails.

How I use AI

Fiction Writing

I use AI for research. It is faster and easier than an internet search where I need to click on a dozen links and skim websites littered with ads to find the information I need.

That’s it. I don’t use AI in any text generation, outlining or other part of the process.

Substack Content

My Substack posts are AI-assisted.

• I dump all my thoughts in a long stream of consciousness prompt.

• AI does the work of restructuring those ideas into a cohesive argument.

• I revise the text for the final post. Even though AI can organize my ideas and uses most of the words from my ‘rough draft,’ it still sounds like AI. I want my posts to sound like me even if I offload some of the effort.

What’s the difference between fiction and content writing?

For me the difference in how I use AI in my fiction writing (research only) and my content generation is based on the goal.

Fiction writing, for me, is as much about the process as the product. It’s not always easy but it’s always satisfying. I don’t want to sacrifice any of the process to someone or something else. That would be like saying, “I love to bake so I gave my favorite recipe to someone to make it for me.”

Content generation is a term I use purposefully because the goal is to create content. It’s as much about expressing my ideas as it is about feeding algorithms and the rules of posting on a regular cadence. In a digital landscape, AI understands the SEO algorithms better than I ever could. Therefore, I leverage a digital tool to meet a digital demand while retaining my ideas and my voice.

1. Tools like Lightkey provide AI‑powered predictive text across Gmail, Outlook, LinkedIn, WhatsApp Web, and other browser‑based communication platforms. These systems run automatically as you type: https://www.lightkey.io/predictive-text-in-google-chrome

2. Google Gemini is operating on email content even when the user never prompts it directly: https://movableink.com/blog/ai-overviews-in-gmail-search-what-you-need-to-know

3. Modern search engines have embedded AI in the search pipeline: https://storyplanets.com/how-search-engines-like-google-and-bing-work-the-role-of-ai-gemini-copilot/