Can I Use AI to Write My Book?
TL;DR: AI can help you with some things about your book, but it can hurt you in other important ways, and relying on it will deprive you of the greatest benefits of being an author.
The impact of AI on the publishing industry is just beginning, surprising, and profound. Already, small, cheap bots programs can create fast, AI-generated nonfiction books. Some human editors and ghost writers use AI to create “fast-release” books.
Are the results any good, though?
I tried a cheap, fast book-writing bot to see what it could do. It was fun, but unable to make something that I would want my name on.
AI can feel like a caffeinated, super-smart friend when it comes to brainstorming, creating outlines, or thinking up titles. With the right prompting, your AI can feel remarkably human. I asked ChatGPT 4 to “write me a recipe for making scrambled eggs in the style of a Japanese haiku.” Here’s what I got:
Crack eggs, whisk gently,
Soy's whisper, spring onion's dance,
Soft folds, sunrise warmth.
It’s fun, right? Definitely a great party trick. But can it write your book?
No. Prompts like these work because there are lots of examples on the web of haiku and scrambled egg recipes. What we are learning about AI is that while it may seem like a caffeinated friend, it is a highly unreliable caffeinated friend. It is wildly unreliable and can be prone to “hallucinations”—that is, making stuff up. And it depends exclusively on knowledge it scrapes from the internet, which is not the most trustworthy neighborhood. Even AI’s biggest promoters caution that everything it delivers must be fact-checked.
Your book is your legacy, an extension of you and maybe your business, too. Would you ask an unreliable friend prone to making things up to write it? I didn’t think so. While a good book can elevate your business and your life, a bad one can kill your reputation.
There’s an even greater problem with relying on AI: what you know that it doesn’t. AI can’t get inside your head (at least not yet). It can’t tell the personal, unique stories and experiences that only you know, stories that will make your book sticky and compelling for readers. It can’t make something that is credible, authentic, or unique. It can write a book, yes. But it can’t write your book.
Finally, the process of writing is a process of struggle. Even if you work with a ghostwriter, you must think, because only good thinking leads to good writing. Thinking is hard work, but that thinking creates a wonderful ancillary benefit for you, the author: it changes you. It teaches you something. If you rely on AI, you deprive yourself of the thinking that is foundational to the creative process, reducing your role to that of editing what the bot produced. You not only make a lesser book; you also miss out on the greatest benefit of writing a book in the first place.
