There has been an ongoing debate in the writing community about AI and its place in writing. On one side of the debate, we have people who believe AI should be used extensively, covering every facet of writing up to and including writing your book. I think perhaps the biggest problem with this argument is that if AI writes your entire book for you, you haven't written a book — you've generated it. And beyond not being copyrightable, the book is lacking something much larger: meaning.
AI isn't sentient. It has no emotions, no soul, no reason. At its core, AI is a predictive engine using mathematical weights to guess what token (essentially a word or small segment of one) should come next given everything that came before it. This can look magical when you provide it a prompt and see an almost human-like answer come back, but "like" is carrying a lot of weight here. The AI isn't human; its answer is just the most probable outcome given its training data.
When a human writes, that person is weighing their biases, opinions, experiences, and feelings. This article, for example, is the culmination of my own hours of research into understanding what an LLM is, what it does, and what it doesn't do. More importantly, this article has a position - a position which I, myself, hold in regard to AI.
To get it out of the way, that position is simple: AI has no place in writing your novel. Novel writing - that is, the act of committing words to the page in your first draft - is a very intimate process that is so much more than just writing. It's about discovery, imagining, learning your world and your characters. It's about massive emotions both good and bad, ups and downs, imposter syndrome and more. Writing is messy and emotional - things which AI is not, and simply can never be.
What is AI good for, then? That depends. AI can be great for proofreading a narrative in a first pass for grammar and spelling. Tools such as Grammarly are fine examples of this. LLMs are trained on enormous bodies of literature and are uniquely positioned to pick up faux pas, spelling mistakes, grammar errors, and more. AI can even catch things like shifting tense, POV, or tone.
But even though it can do these things, you can never trust it fully. AI will hallucinate, and you will never know when it will. You can try all the "don't make mistakes" prompts you like and keep the context window as small as you want - this makes no substantial difference. Want proof? Take a piece of copy and run it through ChatGPT, Gemini, or Claude. Give it a simple prompt: "Proofread this text." Then do it again in a new chat, copying and pasting it exactly, down to the space. Notice anything unusual? The output will be entirely different - even within the same chat. AI has an inherent randomness that can change not just its output but its position entirely.
The problem with AI is that it's output is always confident. ALWAYS. "Should I put this character in a volcano?" Absolutely! Does it know that said character is needed later on to save the children from the witch? Absolutely not! Not only is AI confident, but it almost always wants to please you - and that's not a flaw, it's by design. Many of the system prompts are written in such a way that make the AI an ass-kisser first, and a helpful assistant second. That's not to say they would intentionally mislead you (they literally don't have the capacity for intent) but that because it's a predictive engine, system prompts coupled with a poorly worded user prompt can yield unintended consequences. This is only exacerbated by our own explicit bias.
So yes, you can use AI for editing, and it can even help recommend polished pros, but I would never trust it blindly.
So how should you use AI in your writing flow?
I think this is different for everyone. I personally use Grammarly all the time for writing. Indeed, this very blog that you are reading is full of its famous red, yellow, and blue underlines. Sometimes I will even run my articles through Gemini before posting to ask for a spell check. Sometimes it catches things I didn't see; other times it finds things that don't exist. In both cases, I verify and make the changes myself.
Should you decide that you want to have AI write for you, you should know that any and all content produced by AI - images, video, or copy - is completely uncopyrightable. That means that if you are planning to publish your book traditionally and you have used AI for any significant portions, the publisher may decline to accept your manuscript to avoid the legal headaches alone. After all, what is a novel worth if not for its IP?
Don't be afraid to make mistakes.
Here's the thing, though, if you're genuinely asking if you should use AI to write your book, it's because you've already decided that you can't do it - and that's simply not true. Is writing a novel hard? Absolutely! Writing a novel is probably one of the hardest things I have ever done in my life. It's emotionally draining, time-consuming, and just flat difficult. You'll get four chapters in and realize you have no idea where your characters are going or what even happens next. You'll want to give up, and quite honestly, there is a good chance you will. But anyone can write a novel.
Quill Loop is the embodiment of that. The software asks you to sit each day and put your fingers on the keyboard and type anything. It doesn't matter if it's going to get deleted later (trust me, it probably will in revision anyway), but the fact of the matter is you can't polish what isn't there.
Your first draft - it's going to be awful, like dreadful, full of errors, plot holes, circular logic, incomplete plots and probably won't even resemble the story you set out to write. But in all its mess and typos, there is a story ready to be found, and unlike if you write with AI, that story is completely and entirely yours. You don't have to show it to the world (and you probably shouldn't just yet) you have the time to mould it and sculpt it to be it's best self.
And when you're ready to you can finally show it to your friends, and get feedback or even an editor, which brings me to my next point
Don't be afraid to ask for help
I know that may sound silly, but so many more of you are probably asking AI to edit your drafts because you're afraid that an editor - be it a friend, or a professional - will tear it to shreds and the thought of that is too much. The thing is, AI can't be emotionally honest with you. AI can't tell you for sure that your story is good or bad. I mean, sure, it'll say those things, but again, it doesn't have the emotional intelligence to actually mean them. It can only use the weights it was trained with to predict a response, and coupled with your likely bias prompt, will tell you what you want to hear.
The thing is, when a beta reader, or an editor (and to a degree a friend), gives you feedback, it's honest, real, and human. They have read what you have produced and filtered it through their own bias, and are providing you with their raw, emotional analysis. Oftentimes, especially if you have taken the time to edit your manuscript yourself, while there will be mistakes (and I assure you there will be plenty), you'll likely be pleasantly surprised at their responses.
So what am I trying to say here?
If you take anything away from this, it should be that you should absolutely not write your first draft with AI. You're better than that, smarter, more emotionally intelligent than it, and have a real, honest story to tell. If, after your draft, you want to edit with AI, that is ok, just be aware that you are providing your original work to the company to use to train, and you should be very aware of the limitations of the platform.
But before you open that chatbot and start writing your prompt, maybe take a moment to consider why you might want to do that? Is it because you're afraid to fail? Because the moment you decide to let the machine write for you, you've already failed yourself. You're almost certainly a better writer than you give yourself credit for, and a more real writer than AI can ever be. And remember, the only difference between a dreamer and an author is the tap of keys or the stroke of a pen.