Why AI-Authored Books Don't Work

Hi bookish friends! It’s time for another lukewarm take about AI and creative writing.

The rise of ChatGPT has led to a predictable trend of people who use AI to “write” books. There are even whole Facebook groups and subreddits dedicated to the practice, even though most authors wouldn’t openly admit to doing so on their professional platforms.

And for good reason. Recently, two independent authors came under fire from readers because they accidentally left AI prompts in the text of their romance and fantasy books. One of them even asked the AI to write a passage in a different author’s style (which legally might not constitute plagiarism, but it’s not a great look).

You can read a full article about those authors’ AI shenanigans here. But this incident isn’t just about individual authors’ mistakes — it encapsulates a wider issue about how late-stage capitalism encourages people to view art as nothing more than a product.

The Market Doesn’t Want Art

Self-publishing is a business, and authors want to make money. While I believe generative AI should not have a place in the art of creative writing, I understand why an author whose business model involves releasing books quickly might be tempted to use it. Before generative AI, some self-published authors used underpaid ghostwriters to pump out as many books as possible per year.

But now we’ve reached the point where you can feasibly make a book without a person writing the entire thing. This lays bare a problem that’s been festering for a while in the publishing industry, and in creative fields as a whole: Capitalism does not care about art. It cares about profit.

Books once had to be written by humans. That wasn’t because the market understood that books are art, and art can only be created by humans — it was because once upon a time, machines weren’t capable of writing books. And now they are.

The good news is that in a world with a wide variety of books to choose from, readers can help decide what kinds of books deserve to have a market.

What Readers Want

Most authors who use AI to write their books won’t admit to it for one simple reason: Readers don’t want AI-authored books.

As I argued in a piece I wrote about AI back in February 2023, readers want to feel a connection with the authors of the books they read. Whether I’m reading a complex literary work or a tropey romance novel, I want to feel as though the author imbued the story with their own emotions and experiences, or imaginings of what it might be like to share the experience of their characters. AI doesn’t understand emotions — it just regurgitates emotions that other people have experienced.

Indeed, one reason why many people are against the use of generative AI is because most commercial large language models are trained on huge volumes of pirated creative works (several lawsuits are in progress over this). However, even if modern LLMs were created entirely ethically, I don’t believe readers would be interested in AI-authored books.

Put simply, if you don’t care enough about your work to write the whole thing yourself, why should I care enough to read it?

This means AI-assisted authors have to lie. Or at least, not disclose the AI component of their process and hope nobody notices. When they do get found out, the reader backlash is even more intense, because nobody likes being lied to — especially about something they paid money for.

In addition to the possible reader backlash, there are several more reasons why using AI can be detrimental for a writer.

AI Makes You a Worse Writer

In August of 2024, sci-fi author Ted Chiang wrote an essay in the New Yorker entitled “Why AI Isn’t Going to Make Art.” He argued that, essentially, art is a process made up of lots of little choices. If you delegate most of those choices to an AI, which gives you the average of the choices everyone else has made, you degrade the artistic value of your work.

As a writer, this definition of art resonates with me because I find my writing gets better when I pay closer attention to each individual choice. When I edit my fiction, I inspect each word to decide whether it’s having the maximum impact. Outsourcing any of my writing to AI would make me feel less in control, less diligent, and less of an artist.

I think a lot about this piece in The Verge from 2022 which followed an indie author’s journey with using AI to help write her cozy fantasy series. At one point, she relied on AI so much that she stopped feeling immersed in her own story and began losing track of its plot threads. In the end, however, she found a “balance” where she would mostly write the story herself and use AI to flesh out descriptions.

However, descriptions can be some of the most artistic, immersive parts of a story. Every choice you make in a description sets the tone of a scene for the reader. Writing description is not busywork; it’s worth paying attention to.

The writer explained that using AI for descriptions made her writing process “less fatiguing.” But writing is tiring, because writing is hard work. That doesn’t mean you should try to make it less hard work by letting a machine write passages for you. Tennis is also hard work, but you wouldn’t expect to get better at it by making the tennis robots from WALL-E play all your matches.

Just like your muscles get stronger through exercise, you get better at writing by practicing.

I concede there are gradients to this. Does it stop your work from being art if you ask ChatGPT for synonyms of a word you’re stuck on, or to double-check some grammar? Probably not, but the slope gets slippery very fast. My personal view is that the second I start using ChatGPT to generate complete sentences for me, I am delegating too many of my artistic choices to a machine.

(This is, of course, leaving aside the question of whether it’s ethical to use a tool that was built by stealing a bunch of other writers’ work, but that’s outside the scope of today’s ramble.)

I believe there is inherent value in work created solely by humans — and that readers recognize this value. The question is, do authors recognize it too?

Latest Videos

This is my second month of YouTube hiatus — and this time, it’s because I’m working on a mammoth video essay to unpack Doctor Who’s latest season, which finished airing last Saturday! (Long story short, I have … mixed feelings about the season as a whole.)

In the meantime, I’ve been making short reviews of each individual episode that are available to watch now. Additionally, I’m thrilled that my latest long-form video, about the Handbook for Mortals bestseller list controversy, has cracked 100,000 views, so I feel compelled to plug it one more time!

What I Read This Month

This month’s reading took me from a modern sci-fi classic to a book that hasn’t even come out yet. I enjoyed them both, but for rather different reasons!

Parable of the Sower by Octavia E. Butler

First released in 1993, Parable of the Sower begins its dystopian tale in 2024. I was keen to see how Octavia E. Butler imagined our modern world, and the result was both chillingly familiar and a stark warning of what may yet come to pass. The story begins and ends with the feeling of a world in motion, and I’m excited to continue following the journey with the sequel, Parable of the Talents, very soon!

For my full thoughts, read my full review of Parable of the Sower on Storygraph.

Six Wild Crowns by Holly Race

Thanks to Orbit Books, I got to read this upcoming Tudor-inspired fantasy novel early! Six Wild Crowns releases on June 10th, and it features a definitely-not-England fantasy world in which Henry VIII is hot and magical and also evil, and his queens start conspiring against him and a couple of them fall for each other. I found it imaginative and delightfully twisty, and I’m keen to pick up the sequel when it comes out!

For my full thoughts, read my full review of Six Wild Crowns on Storygraph.

In Case You Missed It …

In which I round up my other fun posts that I made this past month!

As I mentioned earlier, the new season of Doctor Who ended recently, and I posted short reviews of each episode on YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok! I’ve put my reviews into a playlist on YouTube and TikTok, and a story highlight on Instagram, to collect them more easily. I really liked the season to begin with, but was not so impressed with the finale. Stay tuned for my full video essay breaking down my full thoughts!

In between episodes, I also created a mini video essay on YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok to compare and contrast the recent Doctor Who episode Lucky Day with the 2018 episode Kerblam, which were written by the same person and have some interesting parallels:

Next up, my bookstagram friend Basma (@BookishBasma) and I have taken to running live streams every few months to chat about books, content creation, and whatever other random stuff takes our fancy!

This month, our live stream covered our spring book recs, the new resurgence of YA dystopian books, the Shadow and Bone TV show cancellation that we’re still mad about, tariffs, Doctor Who odds and ends, annoying online bookish discourse, and more! You can watch the recording on Instagram.

On May 13, I created an Instagram post to celebrate the release of Age of Pandora by Chloe Harris! I was honored to provide a blurb for this debut YA fantasy novel, and my thoughts basically boil down to “HOW DARE YOU, CHLOE???”

And finally, on Instagram and TikTok, I posted a snippet of my latest YouTube video about the Handbook for Mortals bestseller list disaster, which covers how that scandal also sparked a separate scandal about the authorship of an infamous decade-old fanfiction:

Thank you so much for reading! Until next time, bookish friends.

Love,

Ellie