Table of Contents
TL;DR: Six real questions clients ask me about AI, and exactly what I tell them. These are not the hot takes. They are the answers I’ve worked out across hundreds of conversations with people who are about to invest a year of their life and a meaningful amount of money in writing a book. If you’re thinking about working with a ghostwriter, or about using AI on your own book, these are the questions I’d want you to ask yourself first.
People ask me about AI all the time. On sales calls, at conferences, in the middle of working on their book when something they read scared them. The questions repeat. The answers I give have settled, across years of these conversations, into something I’d write down if anyone asked me to.
Here are six of them, and exactly what I say.
“Can I just have ChatGPT write my book?”
You can. People do. I’m going to tell you what happens when they do, because I’ve watched it happen more than once.
A client of mine, before I started working with him, drafted his whole book in ChatGPT 3.5. He was proud of it. He sent me the chapters expecting me to be impressed. They were terrible. Not offensively terrible. Just hollow, the way every AI-written long-form work is hollow. Clean grammar, polished sentences, every paragraph sitting politely next to the last one, and nobody home.
I didn’t tell him the chapters were bad. I ignored them, ran a real interview series with him, and started writing the book from his actual life. He kept sending me more ChatGPT chapters, trying to help. He genuinely liked the AI versions. The whole project cost extra back-and-forth time because he had to be talked off the AI drafts every few weeks, and the time was billable.
This is the version most people who ask the question don’t picture. They picture writing the book themselves, with AI as the typist, finishing in a month. The reality is that the machine produces a book that reads dead, the writer can’t see why, and they ship a book that quietly damages their reputation instead of building it. The full case is in It’s Not the AI, It’s the Crap.
The honest answer is no. You don’t want ChatGPT to write your book. You want it to help you organize the research and outline the chapters. The writing has to come from you, or from a human you trust.
“Should I use AI for the research part?”
Yes, with one rule: verify every specific claim before it goes in the book.
AI is genuinely useful for research synthesis. You can have it read ten papers on a topic and summarize what they all say, find the consensus, name the disagreements, point to the gaps. You can have it help you compile what’s been written about your subject across dozens of sources. You can have it draft a working outline for a chapter based on a transcript of you talking through what you know about a topic.
What you cannot do is trust the specific facts it produces. AI invents citations that don’t exist. It misattributes quotes. It gets dates wrong. It states statistics with full confidence that came from nowhere. Every specific name, date, number, quote, or citation in your AI-generated research has to be verified against an independent source before it ends up in the book. If you can’t verify it, you cut it.
This is slower than just trusting the AI. It is also the only thing that prevents you from publishing fabricated facts under your own name. I covered the mechanics in AI Hallucination: A Survival Guide for People Who Publish Under Their Own Name.
“My grandfather/mother/partner is in their seventies and wants to write a memoir. Is AI useful for them?”
Yes, and they’re actually in a better position to use AI well than most people half their age.
I work with a client in his seventies on a memoir. He uses AI in three specific ways. He uses it to find missing bits in his own draft, the chapters where the pacing is off or where he hasn’t said enough about something. He uses it to focus himself when he can’t remember whether a story belongs in chapter three or chapter seven. He uses it to generate notes for me about what he wants me to work on next, so when we talk on Tuesday he has a clear agenda instead of a vague feeling about what’s not right.
He doesn’t let it write any of his book. He’s adamant about that. Every word in the manuscript is his, because the book is his life and his voice and the machine has no business inventing either.
That’s the model. The machine handles the logistics of writing. The human handles the writing. For an older writer working on a memoir, AI is genuinely useful as an organizing and focusing tool. It is genuinely useless as a writer. The 71-year-old client knows the difference. He’s going to publish a better book than people half his age who don’t. The longer version of his story is in The 71-Year-Old Memoirist Who Uses AI Better Than You Do.
“Will my readers know if I used AI?”
If you used it to organize your research and outline your chapters, no, and they shouldn’t care. That’s logistics. Every working writer uses tools for logistics, and AI is the current best tool for some of them.
If you used it to write the prose, yes, and they will care. Readers can hear it. They can’t always name what they’re hearing, but they can hear it. The technically clean sentences that have nothing in them. The chapter structure that sits exactly where you’d expect. The absence of the specific risky detail that only someone who lived the work would know to include. The reader senses something hollow and stops trusting the book. Sometimes they finish anyway. They don’t recommend it. The book quietly doesn’t do the work it was supposed to do.
This isn’t about disclosure. Disclosure doesn’t fix anything. The reader didn’t reject the book because the machine touched it. The reader rejected it because the writing was hollow. The machine just happened to be the explanation they found when they went looking.
The line I draw with my own clients is the same one I draw for myself. AI is fine for organizing interviews, building summaries, drafting outlines, handling communications. The grammar checkers are fine, but I never accept their replacement text, because that’s where the machine voice creeps in. The book itself, every word, is human. Not for purity. Because that’s the only thing that produces a book worth reading.
“My ghostwriter says they don’t use AI. Should I believe them?”
It depends on what they mean by “use.”
If they mean they never touch AI for any part of the work, including organizing interviews, summarizing research, or drafting their own communications, they’re either telling the truth and working slowly, or they’re lying. Both are possible. Neither is necessarily a problem.
If they mean the prose of your book is written by a human, that’s the answer you actually want, and that’s the answer that matters. Ask them this question directly. “Will the words in my book be written by you, or will any of them be generated by AI?” A good ghostwriter will give you a direct yes-the-prose-is-human, with whatever caveat is honest about their workflow (most ghostwriters use AI for logistics; very few use it for prose).
The bad sign isn’t a ghostwriter who uses AI for organizing interviews. The bad sign is a ghostwriter who can’t tell you exactly where they draw the line, or who gets defensive when you ask. The line itself is what you’re hiring. Where the writer says “this is mine” and “this is the machine’s” is the answer that matters.
“I’m too old / too busy / too far behind to learn AI. Is that okay?”
No, and I’m going to be direct about why.
It’s not okay because the people in your industry who are willing to learn are going to outrun you, and they aren’t waiting for you to catch up. The longer you wait, the further behind you get. The further behind you get, the harder it is to start. By the time you finally start, you’ll be starting against people who are now five years sharper than you on tools you’ll be learning from scratch.
I’m not telling you to become an AI expert. I’m not telling you to spend your weekends reading research papers. I’m telling you to pick one boring repetitive part of your work this week and find an AI tool that handles it. Spend an hour learning. Spend the next two weeks using. Notice what time you got back. Use the time to get sharper at the part of your work that only you can do.
That’s the entire program. Repeat it next month with the next boring part of your work. In six months you’ll be augmented. The full version of this argument is in Retrain or Be Replaced. There Is No Third Option.
What it adds up to
Use AI for logistics, not for writing. Verify every specific claim before publishing. Don’t let it write your book, ever. Learn one thing this week, not everything by next year. Pick a ghostwriter who can tell you exactly where they draw the line.
That’s what I tell every client who asks. The questions are different. The answers settle into the same shape. The Birth of the Augmented Human covers the broader version of what this looks like across every profession, but for writers and authors and people working on a book, the rules above are the working version.
Frequently Asked Questions