Transcription
I use AI in my books, a lot, and I'm not ashamed of it. I'm actually proud of it, but there is one [clears throat] line that I refuse to cross. Today, I want to show you exactly where I personally draw the line with AI in my own books, why I think the push-button create book strategy is a dead end, and how you can use AI without sacrificing your creativity or your ethics. Now, if you're scared AI is going to replace you, or you're afraid people will think you're cheating if you use it, stay with me. This is for you.
Now, some quick context so you know where I'm coming from. I wrote 14 books the traditional way, but in chair, fingers on keyboard, every word typed by me, no AI, no shortcuts, just the grind. And in 2019, I burned out hard. I didn't fall out of love with storytelling. I still loved ideas and characters, worlds, plot twists, you name it. But the act of sitting down, staring at a blank page, and manually typing every sentence of prose felt like dragging a boulder up a hill every single day. And I started to dread it. I started to dread the part where I opened the document. Not the imagining, not the plotting, just the typing.
So, here's the question that changed everything for me. If I still love stories, but I hate being a human typewriter, why am I trying to be a human typewriter? And that's when AI entered the picture for me, not as a gimmick, but as a way to un-burnout myself.
So, here's my line. I do not believe, endorse, or teach the push-button create a book method. If your entire process is click a button, spit out 40,000 words, upload to Amazon, repeat, I think you're playing a short-term game that will not work. But I'm also not here to morally police you. If that's what you want to do, I'm not going to chase you around the internet with a pitchfork. I just believe very strongly that the person who uses AI as a tool, while keeping their own brain doing what humans do best, is going to absolutely outpace the person who tries to automate everything.
So, here is the rule for my own books. Humans, me, own the decisions. I own the ideas, the themes, the plot, the world building, the character arcs, the emotional beats, the structure, everything. I decided what happens, why it happens, and what it means. And then AI owns as much of the labor as I'm willing to give it. Turning scene beats into sentences, trying different phrasings, generating a first draft of dialogue based on my outline, rearranging text, cleaning up, etc. I do not ask AI to think for me. I ask it to type for me. AI plus a human will always beat AI alone. That's my fundamental belief.
A lot of authors talk as if the act of typing the first draft is this sacred mystical act. But, here's the funny part. Many professional authors have already told us that it is not. Chuck Palahniuk, hope I'm pronouncing that correctly, who wrote Fight Club, has talked about how the actual writing part is a tiny part of his life and the last step of his process. He's drafting in notebooks. He's thinking while he walks the dog. The typing is almost an afterthought. Michael Crichton famously said, "Books aren't written, they're rewritten." Emphasizing that the rewriting process is the more important of the two processes. Jory Graham said that she spends 90% of her time in revision. And I will say as an AI writer, so do I. Book coach Lisa Poisso has said that writing your novel is actually the smallest part of creating a novel and that what you do with your first draft is what makes it blossom.
So, let's just say the quiet part out loud. For many serious writers, the first draft is not the most creative step. Here's how I see it. The most creative is the planning and outlining stage. This is where you invent the world, the characters, the arcs, and the meaning. This requires the most thinking. The next most creative is probably the editing and the revision. This is where you shape and refine and cut and sharpen what you meant to say. The least creative part of the process, in my opinion, is that raw first draft. You have already decided what happens. Now you just need to turn those decisions into sentences. Now of course I realize there's a spectrum of how this works. Uh certain people don't enjoy outlining and so they just start writing and the writing ends up being kind of the outline, in which case that's a slightly different situation, but you get my drift.
That is why I have zero ethical problems using AI on that first draft layer. I'm not outsourcing my creativity, I'm just outsourcing the typewriting part of it. Let me tell you how this looks practically. Today my process is number one, I do the thinking. I brainstorm ideas, I design the world, I outline the plot chapter by chapter, I map the character arcs, and I decide the emotional beats. Then number two, I let the AI do the heavy lifting on prose. I feed it my outline and my scene beats, I tell it the tone, the POV, the style, all of that, and it generates a draft of the scene. Number three, then I become an editor and director. I read what it gave me, keep what works, throw out what does not, rewrite parts, insert my own voice, add personal details, adjust pacing, etc.
Now the first time I did this I actually felt kind of guilty. I remember thinking, am I cheating? Am I allowed to do this? But then I stepped back and looked at the result. In all honesty, the story was better. Why? Because my brain wasn't fried from manually cranking out every sentence. I had energy left for higher-level decisions. I could see structure problems more clearly. I could fix character motivations. I could layer in foreshadowing. These are the more important tasks for the human. AI removed my bottleneck, aka the labor, and gave me back my best access, which is my own mind, my creativity.
Now another fear that people have is that using AI to write faster somehow deepens the art. I wrote this book in a month, that must mean it's low quality. I actually get this a lot in my comments despite the fact that authors have been writing books in a month for literally like centuries. So, no, speed by itself is not a problem. Speed is a problem if you are using it to avoid thinking. But, speed is a massive advantage if it lets you shorten your feedback loop. Think about it like this. If you write one book every 5 years, you get one major round of feedback every 5 years. If you can safely write and publish two, three, five, even 12 books in that same window, and each one is held to a real standard, you get dozens of feedback cycles, more reviews, more reader emails, more data on what resonates and what falls flat, more feedback from your editor. So, who do you think becomes the better writer faster? The person who gets one rep every 5 years or the person who gets 20 reps in the same time? AI used well lets you move through the reps faster, not to skip the work, but to compress the time window that we're looking at.
And I want to quickly pause here because this is exactly why I built StoryHack cuz if you're listening to this and thinking I want to do this ethically, I want to use AI, but I still want to be proud of my name on the cover, that is what StoryHack is for. StoryHack is the fastest and most affordable way to produce 12 or more books a year using AI without sacrificing your creativity or ethics. When you join, you get access to a brand new system that I am going to be announcing this week that I am excited to tell you about that will allow you to write good books every month as well as my complete step-by-step system to go from zero to 12 books or more a year, guides to publish on Amazon including in pretty much every genre you can think of, a bunch of automations to take hours off the grunt work as well as weekly live calls with me. You can try it with zero risk, there's a 7-day free trial so you can lock in the price before it goes up and you can cancel anytime. If that sounds like what you need, there will be a link below this video. All right, let's get back to the AI conversation.
Now, a few months ago, you might have seen headlines about a Microsoft study that listed the 40 jobs most at risk or most exposed to AI, and writers, authors, editors, and teachers were all on it. The way a lot of people read that is, "Oh, these are the 40 jobs that are going to be replaced by AI." But, that is not what the study is actually saying. What it is is measuring how much of the tasks inside those jobs can be done with AI tools. How much is the job going to be affected by AI processes? So, writing, editing, research, customer communication, those are all things AI is good at helping with. So, those jobs are labeled high exposure. High exposure does not automatically mean it will be deleted that the job will disappear. It means this job will be forced to integrate AI deeply into the workflow.
So, here's the part that most people miss. You are really only at risk if number one, you are in one of those high exposure jobs, and number two, you personally refuse to use AI. Because in a world where writers and authors can use AI to research faster, draft faster, and edit smarter, the person who proudly refuses the tool will get out competed by the person who learns to wield it well. We even have a person in my membership that got a huge raise because of what they've learned inside of the membership. The danger is not that your job might be on that list of affected jobs. The danger is being the human on that list who refuses to adapt.
Now, let's hit the three big fears I hear from authors. Fear number one, it won't be my voice. Your voice does not come from which fingers hit which keys. It comes from your decisions, what you choose to talk about, and the experiences you draw from, the way you see the world, the patterns in that you repeat in revision. Also, author voice is not as important as character voice. Each character in your story should have a slightly different voice, all of which can be adjusted by AI. You keep your own fingerprint by owning the ideas and the outline, doing real revision passes where you read things out loud and change what does not sound like you, inserting your own personal stories, your opinions, your weirdness for lack of a better term, cuz AI can spit out bland prose, but it cannot live your life for you.
Now, fear number two is that readers will think that I cheated. Most readers actually do not care how many hours you spent typing. They care whether the story moved them and whether the book was worth the time and money. If you deliver a great book that hits them emotionally, they are not going to boycott you because you used a tool to help you with your draft. I've said it before and I've said it again, it's only AI slop if it's bad.
Fear number three is if I use AI, I will get lazy. Now, some people might, but let's be honest, most struggling authors are not exactly suffering from too much productivity right now. Most are stuck in the opposite trap, perfectionism, fear, endless tinkering, and not finishing. If AI is the thing that finally lets you finish a book and get it out and learn from readers and write the next one, that is not laziness, that is leverage. Integrity is not I suffered as much as possible. Integrity is I showed up, I did the real work, and I used every ethical tool available to do my best.
So, how to figure out where your line is? Here's a simple exercise. Number one, write down everything you love about writing. Maybe that's brainstorming, discovery writing, world building, writing dialogue, whatever lights you up. Number two, write down everything you dread or avoid. Maybe that is drafting description, rewriting the same scene, fixing grammar, restructuring, or maybe the marketing. And step three, give the dread list to AI first. Start by offloading the parts that drain you the most. Keep the parts that energize you. The principle is simple. Humans should own meaning, taste, and decisions. AI should own as much labor as you are comfortable delegating.
You do not have to go from zero to full AI first drafts overnight. Start with whatever brings you down, whatever part of the process is not your favorite. Then try having AI do those things. Keep what works, throw out what doesn't. Treat it like any other tool. You test, you adjust, then you create your own rules.
So, here's my line one more time. I do not push button create book. I will use AI heavily for the labor parts of the writing so I can pour more of myself into the creative parts. AI is not the enemy. Stagnation is the enemy. You are not competing against AI. You are competing against authors who are using AI to become more prolific and more skilled while you argue about whether it is allowed. Your job is not to beat the machine. Your job is to become the kind of creator that the machine makes even more dangerous.
Now, if this helped you, tell me in the comments where you currently draw the line with AI in your writing. And if you want a proven system to use AI ethically to write more and better books every year, check out Story Hacker in the description. Thanks for hanging out with me, and I'll see you in the next video.