Why fiction writers should not write with AI

Despite what you may have heard from the hype mill, writing with AI may not be a good thing for you, especially if you are a student or a beginner writer. If you write with AI, you open yourself up to professional and personal dangers that may have long-term impact on your career and perhaps even on your ability to give expression to your ideas and thoughts.

In this article, I am going to give you a complete breakdown of why writing fiction with AI might be a mistake that you probably want to avoid if you care about your writing career.

Your Readers Hate AI

Anyone who reads for pleasure will tell you that they do not want their books written by machine learning algorithms. Readers want stories and poetry and art from writers — real flesh-and-blood human beings like themselves.

Even when they do like something made using AI, as evidenced by this study published in Scientific Reports, the appreciation disappears as soon as they learn the truth. It is possible for AI-generated works to resemble human-made art, but those who like art like it because it was made by humans. Take that away and you are left with a hollow feeling, as if you just fell in love with nothing.

The only way you can get away with writing using AI is by lying to your audience. If you are a writer with any kind of audience, you don’t need me to tell you how precious your relationship with them is and how silly you would have to be to jeopardise it by lying to them. If you wouldn’t pretend that you wrote something someone else wrote, why would you pretend to be the writer of text generated by a chatbot? And if you think your readers will not feel any different about your work even if they knew you created it using AI, go ahead and ask them, but be sure to wear a helmet.

People love books, yes. But what they truly fall in love with is the mind, the life, and the experiences behind it. To forget that in pursuit of “write books faster with ChatGPT” would be a monumental mistake for any young writer.

Publishers and Editors Hate AI

Influencers and hustle bros might be completely sold on the revolutionary potential of generative AI as far as creating content is concerned, but among professional writers and artists, there is widespread agreement that generative AI companies have stolen from them and are presently in the process of launching an assault on culture affecting art, writing, and publishing.

If you are a young writer looking to get traditionally published, you should know that many magazine editors and publishers to whom you might submit your short stories explicitly forbid the use of AI. They not only reject submissions created with AI, they even blacklist writers, making sure they will never be published by them in the future.

Here is what science fiction magazine Clarkesworld says on its submissions page in a clearly marked, big grey box:

We will not consider any submissions translated, written, developed, or assisted by these tools. Attempting to submit these works may result in being banned from submitting works in the future.

Source: Submission Guidelines: Clarkesworld Magazine

They’re not the only ones. You can find similar sentiments in the submission guidelines of Uncanny Magazine:

Please note that Uncanny Magazine does not accept any submissions written with artificial intelligence or similar technologies. These submissions will be rejected, and authors will no longer be able to submit to Uncanny Magazine if they didn’t disclose that they used artificial intelligence or similar technologies for creating their submissions.

Source: Submissions — Uncanny Magazine

Beneath Ceaseless Skies clarifies its position in a little more detail, emphasising the importance of voice and making clear what it considers to be the problem with AI-generated work:

We want stories written through the author’s unique sensibilities and passions. AI mines the sensibilities and passions of others, using training data that may have biases and may be infringing on the copyright of other writers. We’re not interested in that. We also find that stories that have been run through AI-based grammar-check lose the author’s voice. (We want stories written in the author’s unique voice; including writers for whom English is not a first language. AI-based grammar-check homogenizes the prose using patterns averaged from the work of others.)

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