Writing used to mean pouring your heart into the page. 

Now, some authors are letting a machine do it for them. As AI quietly becomes the ghostwriter behind more books, readers are asking: Where did the human touch go?

AI tools have transitioned from being special features to becoming essential tools for creative work. Writers use AI tools mainly to generate titles and correct grammar. The use of AI for writing entire scenes has become widespread, which has led readers to take notice. 

The recent cases of Lena McDonald’s Dark Hallow series and K.C. Crowne’s Dark Obsession using AI prompts without disclosure have caused fan outrage because readers want to know if machines contributed to the writing process.

The core issue revolves around the dying art of creativity. Readers do not like to be blindsided by a book that wasn’t written by a human. The ramifications of AI are hurting the creativity of writers and readers. We expect to read something written by a person who put their heart and soul into a book and took the time to understand and develop characters and a world.

There is a spectrum to using AI in creative writing. There are very distinct and dramatic levels to using AI when writing, from using it to check for errors that a common spell checker would miss to using it to write a whole book in 72 hours.

The ethical boundary between human involvement and AI usage tends to expand when moving toward the right end of the spectrum. Most readers do not object to automated spell-checking functions. The use of assistive tools to improve sentence structure receives approval from readers who are non-native speakers or have disabilities.

Readers do not throw hands and put authors on a blacklist for using spell check or grammar-checking functions. It’s the use of it to replace the art of writing that they have a problem with. You cannot convey genuine human emotions through AI as it does not know what those feelings are.

The enduring legacy of authors Fyodor Dostoevsky, William Faulkner and Virginia Woolf stems from their ability to merge words with their personal life experiences. These are just a few of the best of the best authors who have shown just how creative and idealistic a person can be without the use of a machine thinking for them. We have masterpieces that are still being studied today so that people can see how an author should write and convey emotion based on these authors; these are the guidelines we need.

The ability to duplicate patterns through machines does not equal the ability to reveal new insights. The process of pattern combination in machines differs from how people infuse their personal essence into written content.

The industry continues to develop new policies to address this issue. Amazon has recently added new content guidelines for people who want to sell their books, whether digital or physical. 

Another platform that has developed a policy on AI-generated books is IngramSpark, a company specializing in self-publishing books. Their policy is that you can use AI to assist in grammar or spelling help, but it cannot be a fully AI-generated book. 

Social media is the place where everyone goes to talk about their opinions on things that matter to them. TikTok, which houses a huge community of book lovers, Booktok, is sounding the alarms on these things.

User @biancathebibliophile posted a video in July 2024 about seeing a new statement on a book’s copyright page explaining that using the book to help train AI is prohibited.

Also, you have creators like @emmaskies, who posts about her hot takes on different things in the book world. The one I am referencing is her talking about how if a book cover is AI-generated, then the book is probably as well or horribly written, putting in her caption, “If someone doesn’t want me to think their work is poorly made, stolen slope, they probably shouldn’t represent it with poorly made stolen slope.”

This right here shows how people feel about AI in writing. You cannot have it! It is unethical. 

You are stealing other people’s words because the generators are trained on other people’s works. This was proven three years ago when a Reddit user @kafetheresu went on a deep dive into these generators and saw that they have been using sites like Archive of Our Own (AO3) to train these models.

Now moving onto the ‘lesser offense’ which is AI assisted writing. This is taking away a whole career and livelihood of people. Here at the Pacer, we have a system of how we edit and using AI to do that is cutting out half of our work to make us better writers. (It also cuts out our copy editor’s job, but Keenan can just start writing again.)

You are taking the learning out of this. Writing is not something you are born with but it something you learn and practice like photography. You have to spend time messing up and hating what you wrote to get to the point where you find what you do like and how to write it better.

Read classics to see where authoring started and see how we have grown. Take inspiration from anything and everything. Don’t let the feeling that you have to get this thing done by a certain time push you to use AI.

Set small and achievable goals for yourself to achieve them. Most authors, especially successful authors, take months to several years to complete one book.

There is no time limit on creativity; you just have to find it and harness it.