Is AI Helpful or Harmful?

While lurking through writer forums, I’ve noticed the big debate surrounding the future of AI and its impact on writers, readers, and publishers. There are a lot of opinions out there about how helpful AI can be from simple editing to outlining your story to writing your entire story. I’ve seen plenty of advertisements for writing software promoting how quickly you can complete your book with the use of AI, but is it still helpful? Or is it finally getting to a point where it’s hurting authors?

Software is becoming more sophisticated each day and publishers are starting to use it more to find plagiarism in the books submitted to them. Which means, anything AI related from clicking on words corrected through good old Grammarly to ChatGPT are being flagged. Of course, this is a warning for the traditional author, but what about all those indie authors who have to rely on themselves for writing, editing, formatting, and publishing? Well, readers are growing wary of them too as seen in exhibit A.

As someone who reviews books and enjoys doing so, there’s something different about AI written novels. They lack passion, they lack cohesion, and they don’t have a soul. While AI can, and has, fooled many people, it’s not quite there yet. It’s like an uncanny valley with books. However, the light-to-average reader may not be able to discern an AI written story from one written by an actual living, breathing, human and that’s what makes it dangerous.

I sparked quite a heated debate on an Inkitt forum recently when I offered my services (free, of course) to review completed books on the platform, but declined to review books written with AI. I even attracted the attention of a troll who honed in on the use of grammarly as AI and while, technically, it is, I explicitly wrote that I didn’t want to review books that had whole scenes, chapters, or the entire book written by AI. It’s my choice.

I choose to read works written by the struggling writer. I want to support the people who pour their blood, sweat, and tears into their stories. I want to cry and laugh with them through the whole beautiful mess of it all. And it’s just plain unfair to essentially cheat the system and churn out a mash of AI jumbled books clogging up the algorithms because they don’t know any better.

AI gives us a lot to think about as a reader and a writer. I only use editing software to help find those pesky grammatical mistakes that my brain seemingly scans right over and ignores. Even then, I don’t allow AI to fix it for me and instead fix it myself in my word document. It’s rare that I take it’s advice on sentence restructuring as well, but sometimes it can be helpful. Other than that, I’ll write my own book how I want to, thank you very much.

It’s ultimately the choice of the writer how much AI assistance is needed, but it’s possible it’s getting a little out of hand. It’s certainly diminishing the trust of readers and, eventually, publishers will have a hard time taking a risk on a new author. Who’s to say publishers won’t decide to cut out the middle man altogether and turn to AI to churn out their books as well? If we, writers, take a shortcut, then so can they. I suppose we’ll find out in the coming future.