The Dangers of AI Writing Tools by Merle Erith

I am an editor. Some of you might have read my book Let’s Write Right and thank you very much if you have. A new chapter for an updated edition is in the pipeline but for now, I would love to share a few brief thoughts on using AI to write your book.

Just don’t.

Too brief? Okay, let’s go a bit deeper. In the last three weeks, I have been more or less bombarded by AI. And as it happens, the most common ‘sins’ of writing with AI were represented in the samples. The first and possibly the most annoying was from the denier. This author had taken huge swathes from the net on the advice of his little AI helper and just dumped them on the page without the slightest attempt to hide it. So there it all sat, complete with hyperlinks, odd fonts and colours and even the superscript numbers for an abandoned footnote. I did a count up – I dearly love a statistic – and in a relatively long book, 65% was direct web grabs, with 150 hyperlinks still present. The author when challenged went through the usual order of excuses. First comes outrage. ‘I certainly did not copy anything!’ Next comes the partial climb down. ‘I may have done some copying, but only a little.’ And finally, buck passing but the answer I knew was the answer all along. ‘AI made me do it.’ It’s no excuse, AI didn’t hold a gun to his head, It was just a darned sight easier than actually putting the work in,

When it comes to hiding in plain sight, don’t get me started on non-breaking spaces, the other prime clue for ‘stuff off of Wiki’ as an author described it to me recently. That is as in ‘it’s only stuff off of Wiki so that’s all right’. No, it’s not all right. It isn’t your book if it is just a series of chunks of web content and being told by ChatGPT that it’s all right does not make it all right.

Another kind of AI ‘help’ is to … well, there is no other way to put it, to get AI to write your book for you. The hilarious thing was that the ‘author’ (otherwise known as ‘the person who paid for an AI book generator’) in this case then asked me to edit it. But isn’t it already …? You could go mad that way. Anyhow, into my inbox it popped and it was hilarious. The AI generator she had chosen was one that added an adjective to literally everything. This is not an extract, I never share edit content no matter how chucklesome, but this is close:

‘She came down the descending stairs, holding the smooth thin banister with her smooth thin hand and stepped with her slim foot onto the chilly, cold floor. She walked sinuously into the clean yet cluttered kitchen and approached the empty shining sink and turned the metal tap with a slender hand.

Seventy thousand words of that! Can you imagine anyone ploughing through it? I did a page and then declined the gig but I expect it is out there, self-published and languishing at a million or so Amazon ranking, to the utter amazement of its ‘author’. 

The third and perhaps the least common use of AI is to have it rewrite your book after you have written it. This one I really don’t understand. You have written it, for goodness’ sake. Why do you want some brainless, bloodless, emotionless bit of IT to redo it for you? I have had several of these in the last couple of weeks and they are so frustrating you could scream. One was a quite tricky science title, which had doubtless once been quite interesting but the version I was sent was just a load of bullet pointed lists and a brief bio of famous people when they cropped up in the text. It had made, essentially, gibberish out of what had clearly once been a cogent and interesting book. The other example and I hope this is the last time I ever see it, was someone who had used AI to populate his text with footnotes. In this case, every time there was a name, there was a footnote and the footnote, by definition, was a web grab ‘off of Wiki’. Easy to put right but … why?

I suppose the long and the short of it is that AI would be great if it did the washing up and left you time to write. But using AI so you have time to do the washing up strikes me as a bit daft. I write, and edit, because I love it. If no one ever published another word of mine, I would still write, because it is how I relate to the world, how I get things off my chest, how I get my stories down to be read in the future, even if it is only by the people who clear my room in the Twilight Home for Old Authors when I shuffle off this mortal coil. If I needed AI before I could string two words together, I wouldn’t be doing any stringing. So I do struggle with all this ‘let AI write your book for you’. If AI writes it, it isn’t yours. And that is an argument that has no other answer. Put simply, you write words in certain order, book yours. AI cobbles together some derivative drivel, book not yours.  

But finally, a word or two from Charles Dickens.

It was a time of great contrasts: wisdom and folly, belief and doubt, hope and despair. The era mirrored our own, defined by extremes and viewed by many as the best or worst of times.

Not quite the same, is it?

Merle Erith is the author of Let’s Write Right: An Aspiring Authors’ Guide to Writing, Self-Publishing and Traditional Publishing. For more information on that title please click here.