I use AI every day. I’ve written two free guides on the subject, one covering how to use AI for writing and one covering where AI fails. I’ve built an entire library of 46 handbooks that integrate AI into writing craft. I’m not anti-AI. I’m anti-stupidity about AI, and there’s an enormous amount of stupidity circulating about what AI can and cannot do for writers.
The short version: AI is a research assistant with encyclopedic knowledge and no memory. A brainstorming partner who never gets tired. An editor who spots patterns you’ve stopped noticing. A collaborator who generates variations faster than you can evaluate them. Used well, it makes you a better, faster writer. Used poorly, it produces generic slop indistinguishable from the thousands of other AI-assisted projects flooding the market.
Which of those you get depends on the writer and whether they understand what the tool does. Writers who expect AI to write the book for them end up publishing slop under their own names. Writers who refuse to touch it on principle burn afternoons on grunt work a machine would have sorted in minutes. I think both are making a mistake, and publishing slop costs a writer far more than a few lost afternoons.
What does AI do well for writers?
The value is in AI breaking you out of the loop your own brain is stuck in.Share on X
AI excels at brainstorming. When you’re stuck on a plot problem, a character decision, or the structure of a chapter, AI can generate twenty possible solutions in the time it takes to finish your coffee. Not all of them work. Most won’t, but buried in the pile you’ll find approaches that never occurred to you during solo brainstorming. The answers themselves matter less than the jolt. The value is in AI breaking you out of the loop your own brain is stuck in. For more, see logical fallacies every writer should recognize and What I Learned in Pascal in 1980 That Every AI Executive Should Know.
Research support is where AI excels. Need to understand medieval siege warfare for a fantasy battle? AI explains catapult mechanics without forcing you to become a military history scholar. Writing contemporary fiction set in a profession you don’t know? AI provides enough insider knowledge to sound credible without requiring a career change. It eliminates the Wikipedia rabbit holes that destroy entire writing afternoons. You know the pattern: start looking up one historical detail, click an interesting link, follow another connection, and suddenly you’re reading about 16th-century bread recipes when you only needed to know what people wore to funerals.
Revision analysis is another AI strength. Feed it a chapter and ask specific questions. Does the pacing drag in the middle section?
Is the dialogue between these two characters distinct enough? Does this scene accomplish what I need it to accomplish? AI catches patterns you’ve become blind to after reading your own work fifteen times. It spots repetitive sentence structures, overused words, and sections where the energy drops.
Tedious but necessary tasks are where AI shines. Grammar checking, formatting consistency, citation management, summarizing research notes, organizing complex information. These tasks eat hours without contributing to the creative work. AI handles them quickly and accurately enough to free your time for the writing that matters.
Grunt work is the AI use I’ll defend hardest. Nobody became a writer to reformat citations, and a writer who spends a Saturday doing it by hand out of some purity rule is spending hours the book needed.
Where does AI fail writers?
AI writes in its own voice and can’t write in yours. The output is grammatically clean and emotionally flat, as if a committee of English teachers who learned writing from textbooks and never from living had generated it, and reading it is about as engaging as reading appliance warranties. It drives me nuts that new writers hand the machine their voice, the one thing that makes a book theirs, and then wonder why readers drift off.
I spent months testing AI’s limitations when Claude first became available.
My twenty years as Director of Computer Operations and Technical Services at Trader Joe’s taught me that you cannot trust a system until you know how it breaks. The same principle applies here. You cannot use AI well until you understand how it fails.
AI struggles with nuance. Irony often flies past it entirely. Sarcasm gets interpreted as genuine enthusiasm.
Fresh metaphors get misread or interpreted literally. Cultural context creates gaps that produce errors no human writer would make. If your writing depends on subtext, implication, or the gap between what characters say and what they mean, AI will miss it.
AI drifts in long sessions. Context that was established clearly at the beginning of a conversation degrades over time. Character details shift. Tone wanders. Established facts get contradicted. The longer you work in a single session, the less reliable the output becomes. That’s a characteristic of how these systems work, and no fix is coming.
AI is confidently wrong. It generates plausible-sounding information that’s factually incorrect and presents it with the same confidence as accurate information. It invents book titles, fabricates quotes, misattributes ideas, and creates fictional experts. Every factual claim AI makes needs verification. Every quote needs checking. Every reference needs confirmation. Writers who skip this step publish embarrassing errors.
AI produces generic output when asked to write prose.
The sentences are correct. They’re also bland, predictable, and indistinguishable from every other AI-generated paragraph on the internet. Common patterns include overuse of certain transitional phrases, balanced sentence structures that never vary, hedging language that avoids strong positions, and a certain smoothness that lacks the rough edges of human writing. Readers increasingly recognize these tells even when they cannot articulate what feels off.
What Is the Hybrid Approach to AI Writing?
AI does the grunt work: research, organizing, a first pass at structure. You write every sentence that has to sound like you, and that’s most of them.
From the podcast
Martin Ricketts runs the same sequence and has a shorthand for it, described on Leaders and Their Stories:
The way I do it’s AI, human, AI, AI, human. So the human does it first.The order matters more than the ratio. Whoever goes first sets the voice, and if that’s the machine, everything after it is editing instead of writing.
The best AI-assisted writing treats AI as a powerful but flawed collaborator.
You bring creativity, judgment, emotional honesty, and your unique voice. For more on AI as assistant, not author, hear Richard on Tequila and Tech Talk. AI brings speed, breadth, tireless consistency, and pattern recognition. Neither of you is sufficient alone. You’re slow, limited in knowledge, and easily tired. AI is generic, emotionally hollow, prone to errors, and incapable of judgment calls. Together, you compensate for each other’s weaknesses.
This only works if you maintain clear boundaries about who does what. AI brainstorms. You select. AI researches. You verify. AI drafts. You rewrite in your own voice. AI analyzes. You decide what to do with the analysis. The moment you start accepting AI output without filtering it through your own judgment, the work stops being yours and starts being generic.
I know an AI specialist who wrote his book with ChatGPT and published it with no editing at all. It’s getting positive reviews and doing exactly what he wanted it to do, and more power to him.
The tool was never the point. He knew what the book had to do for its readers, and most people asking a chatbot to write their book haven’t figured that out yet.
I use AI extensively in my ghostwriting practice and in developing my writing handbooks. I use it for brainstorming structures, researching unfamiliar industries, analyzing draft chapters for pacing problems, and generating variations when I’m stuck. I don’t use it to write prose that goes to clients. The prose is mine. The voice is mine or my client’s. AI supports the process. It doesn’t replace the writer.
How to Start
If you’re new to AI-assisted writing, start small. Pick one brainstorming session where you’re stuck on a plot point or a chapter structure. Use AI for that single session. See what happens. Evaluate what was useful and what wasn’t.
The following week, try a different type of task. If you brainstormed first, try revision analysis next. Feed AI a chapter and ask specific questions about it. Notice what works differently. Brainstorming needs open-ended prompts. Revision needs specific questions about specific text.
Build gradually. As you learn what works for your process, integrate more. Add new types of tasks. Develop your prompt library. Find your rhythm. There’s no rush. Better to use AI well for a few tasks than poorly for many.
When things don’t work, and they won’t always work, that’s information.
Adjust your approach. Try different prompts. Provide more context. AI-assisted writing is a skill. Like any skill, it develops through practice, failure, and adjustment. The writers who use AI well kept refining their approach until it worked, and plenty of them got it wrong for a while first. I’d trust that writer over anyone who claims they had it figured out on day one.
Why Does AI Have a Voice Problem?
This deserves its own section because it’s the single most important issue for any writer using AI.
AI-generated text has tells. Read any AI output aloud. Does it sound like you? Or does it sound like a competent stranger wrote it? Your ear catches what your eye misses. Awkward rhythms, unnatural word choices, and passages that don’t match your voice all become obvious when you hear them.
If you find yourself performing the text instead of speaking it naturally, something is wrong. Search your document for AI-typical phrases: “it’s important to note,” “in the realm of,” “when it comes to,” “individuals” when you mean “people,” “facilitate” when you mean “help,” “delve” when you mean anything at all. Replace them with how you’d say it.
AI tends toward consistent patterns. Similar sentence lengths. Similar structures. Similar rhythms. Human writing has rough edges, unexpected turns, short punchy sentences followed by longer flowing ones. If your prose feels too smooth, too balanced, too polished in a way that lacks personality, AI voice has crept in. Fix it.
Readers rarely know why a smooth page bores them, and they don’t need to know in order to close the book. You won’t get a complaint. You’ll just lose them, and I think that’s the worst way to lose a reader, because you never find out it happened.
My AI Shortcomings guide includes a complete list of patterns to watch for. My Using AI for Writing guide covers the positive side of collaboration. Both are free. Together they prepare you to work with AI effectively instead of becoming dependent on it.
The full AI-Enhanced Writer’s Library has 46 handbooks applying these principles to specific craft areas. For one-on-one guidance, book coaching is available. Start with a conversation.
Writers who let the machine write the book and then blame AI when readers walk away have it backwards. The tool did what it was built to do. Use it for the grunt work, write every sentence that matters yourself, and you’ll end up with a book people finish. Hand it your voice and you’ll get the same flat book everyone else is putting out, and you’ll deserve the silence that follows.
