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I use AI every day. I have published over 113 books and completed 54 ghostwriting projects, and AI is part of my process for research, brainstorming, outlining, and analysis. I have also written an entire series of handbooks on AI-assisted fiction writing, which means I have spent hundreds of hours testing what AI does well and documenting exactly where it fails.
AI will not replace writers. It will not make you a better writer by itself. And if you use it carelessly, it will make your writing worse in ways you might not notice until readers do.
Here is what I have learned.
What AI Does Well
AI excels at tasks that involve pattern recognition, analysis, and generating raw material you can shape. Brainstorming, outlining, identifying structural problems in a manuscript, checking consistency across hundreds of pages, and analyzing voice patterns are all areas where AI provides genuine value.
When I start a ghostwriting project, AI helps me organize research, generate initial outlines, and identify gaps in the structure I am building. When I coach fiction writers, AI helps me demonstrate craft principles by generating examples we can analyze and improve together. When I am writing my own fiction, AI helps me brainstorm plot alternatives when I am stuck, check for consistency across a complex series, and catch problems I have gone blind to after living with a manuscript too long.
The key distinction: AI is useful for analysis and raw material. It is not useful for final prose, voice, or creative decisions. Those remain human work.
The Confidence Problem
AI delivers wrong information with the same confidence it delivers correct information. There is no difference in tone, certainty, or presentation between an accurate statement and a hallucination. Your brain uses confidence as a credibility signal, thousands of years of evolution trained you to trust confident speakers, and AI exploits that tendency without meaning to.
I have caught AI being confidently wrong about historical dates, scientific processes, legal procedures, publishing industry standards, and the plots of novels. Each time, the delivery was indistinguishable from the times it was correct.
Ask AI for academic citations and it might generate author names, journal titles, publication dates, volume numbers, and page ranges that do not exist. The format looks perfect. The citation is completely fabricated. I tested this extensively. About a third of the time, the citations led nowhere. The authors had not written those papers. The journals had not published those issues.
The rule: verify anything factual that matters. Treat AI’s factual claims as starting points for verification, not authoritative answers. If a fact matters to your story or your reputation, check it through sources that can actually be wrong in ways they would acknowledge.
Voice Flattening
This is the problem that will damage your writing most if you do not watch for it.
AI tends toward a default voice: helpful, thorough, balanced, slightly formal. That default bleeds into everything it generates. Characters who should sound distinct from each other start sounding the same. Narrators who should have personality get smoothed into generic competence. The prose is technically correct and completely dead.
AI vocabulary has tells. Words like delve, tapestry, testament, nuanced, landscape, journey, realm, myriad, multifaceted, resonate, compelling, and profound appear at rates that no human writer would produce naturally. If you see these words clustering in your manuscript, AI has flattened your voice.
Fiction requires surprise, freshness, unexpected word choices. AI delivers predictability dressed in formal vocabulary. A sentence like “The Miami sky was the color of a headache” is not something AI would produce. It is specific, slightly wrong in a way that feels exactly right. Human voice lives in those small wrongnesses that AI smooths away.
The fix: never use AI-generated prose as final text. Use it as raw material you rewrite in your own voice. And search your manuscript for AI-tell words. If you are using them at AI rates, replace them.
POV Drift
AI shifts point of view mid-scene constantly. You are writing a scene from one character’s perspective. You ask AI to help develop the next few paragraphs. AI delivers prose that suddenly includes another character’s internal thoughts, or describes something the viewpoint character cannot see, or shifts to omniscient overview for no reason.
AI does not maintain POV discipline because it does not experience point of view the way readers do. It generates plausible text, and plausible text sometimes includes perspective shifts that feel natural in isolation but violate your established POV. Without constant correction, your carefully maintained viewpoint degrades into head-hopping.
I deal with this in my own fiction. My novel Peacekeeper is a complex series with multiple POV characters shifting between first person and third limited. AI assistance requires explicitly stating POV constraints in every prompt and reviewing every AI-touched scene specifically for perspective violations.
The fix: state POV constraints explicitly every time you work with AI. Review every AI-assisted scene asking “Can my viewpoint character perceive this? Know this? Interpret this way?” Flag every violation and fix it before it contaminates your sense of character perspective.
The Hallucination Compounding Problem
Hallucinations compound when you build on them. You ask AI for information. AI hallucinates a detail. You accept the detail and ask follow-up questions. AI builds on the hallucinated detail, generating more content that assumes the false information is true. By the end of the conversation, you have an elaborate structure built on a foundation that does not exist.
This happens especially in research sessions where one question leads to another. The first hallucination contaminates everything that follows.
I have seen AI generate fictional backstories for real historical figures that fit the era perfectly. Plausible details, specific events, coherent narrative. None of it happened. The general knowledge was right. The specific details were fabricated. AI filled the gap between what it knew and what I asked for with probable-sounding content that was not true.
What AI Cannot Do
AI cannot capture someone else’s voice. Ghostwriting is fundamentally about listening to another person, understanding how they think and speak, and translating that into prose that sounds like them. Every one of my 54 ghostwriting projects starts with extensive interviews where I learn not just what the client wants to say but how they say it. AI has no capacity for that interpersonal understanding.
AI cannot make creative decisions that serve a specific story. It can generate options, but choosing which option serves your narrative requires understanding what your story is about at a level AI does not reach. When I coach fiction writers through plot problems, the solution usually comes from understanding the character’s psychology, the thematic intent, and the reader experience the writer is building. AI can generate twenty alternative plot directions. A human has to know which one is right for this story.
AI cannot replace the emotional authenticity that makes readers care. Content that moves people comes from genuine human experience, specific detail, and the vulnerability of putting something real on the page. AI can imitate the structure of emotional writing without ever producing the substance.
How to Use AI Without Wrecking Your Writing
Use AI for analysis, research, brainstorming, and consistency checking. Do not use it for final prose. Verify every fact that matters. Watch for voice flattening. Maintain POV discipline manually. Treat AI output as raw material, never as finished work.
I have written three books specifically about these issues. Using AI for Writing covers how to integrate AI into your writing process effectively. AI Shortcomings documents every failure mode I have encountered and how to defend against them. Both are free. The AI-Enhanced Awful Writing Handbook covers how to identify and fix the specific problems AI introduces into prose, including the vocabulary tells, voice flattening, and structural patterns that mark AI-damaged writing.
My full collection of AI-enhanced writing handbooks covers every aspect of fiction craft with AI-assisted techniques, from character development to world-building to dialogue to point of view.
For ghostwriting or book coaching, start with a conversation.