My Take on Using AI in Your Creative Endeavors—DON’T
Unless you’ve been living off the grid, have taken a years-long hiatus from news or social media, or are newly paying attention to the world around you, you know that AI has been a major topic of conversation for some time.
There are many ways assistive AI can be useful in helping to streamline our tasks. For instance, at a recent physical therapy appointment, my therapist informed me that they would be using AI for notetaking during my evaluation. This allowed them to be fully hands-on and focused on me, the patient—without having to pause to take notes. After the evaluation, they had an immediate document to work from as we created my physical therapy routine.
However, generative AI (Gen-AI) leaves me deeply troubled—especially because of the embedded moral and ethical problems. LLMs (that’s Large Language Models for those of you not in the know) are trained on stolen work. Gen-AI uses and copies existing work, takes the average of what it finds, and reformulates it into something “new”—mostly without consent or regard for copyright or compensation. This is unethical. Beyond that, it diminishes the value of the creative process and trains users to think less critically.
But my personal grievances are not what this post is about. Instead, I’m here to help you decide whether you, as a writer, should use Gen-AI in the creation of your manuscript or illustrations. If you don’t care about the “why” and you just want a simple answer, it’s no. You should not.
For the most part, publishers aren’t interested in Gen-AI work. So, if you’re hoping to get published, using AI is only going to make it harder (and it’s already really hard!). While none of the Big 5 publishing houses—Harper Collins, Penguin Random House, MacMillan, Simon & Schuster, Hachette Livre—have (to date) formalized how they handle Gen-AI in manuscripts, they all agree that any work must be copyrightable (Gen-AI work is not). Canadian publishers and organizations who administer top literary awards have stated that they are only interested in human-generated material. Not surprisingly, most academic presses are taking a firm stance on the use of gen-AI—presses like Wiley, Oxford University Press, and Springer all require authors to disclose if, how, and why they’ve used AI. Even in the self-publishing arena using gen-AI could be a deal breaker. Independent booksellers and presses have pledged that they won’t stock or publish gen-AI or AI-assisted books.
Further, many agents and editors have taken a firm stance. Some will edit your AI-generated manuscript, but the fees will come with an AI surcharge, while others are simply saying NO, and giving gen-AI manuscripts a pass. The bottom line is this: if you are an author, and you want to publish your work—traditionally or not—it is not to your benefit to use generative AI. For a more nuanced understanding of why using gen-AI will cost you more in the long-run, spend a minute reading Josh Bernoff’s February 5, 2026 blog or Mary Kole’s August 15, 2026 post.
“But, AI helps me write better!” the novice writer shouts. “It will help me get my book to the market faster!” If this sounds like you, I’m here to deliver the hard truth. It doesn’t. It won’t. You aren’t learning anything by letting AI do the work. Skipping the hard work of learning won’t make you learn faster or better. It won’t improve your skill. (I would even argue that it’ll make you a worse writer, but that’s a discussion for another day.)
Creative writing is just that … creative. If you take the creation out of the creative process, can you really call yourself a creator? I think not.
AI doesn’t understand the reason for your writing or experience the feeling of an event. AI might be able to compile elements of a story, but Story is more than a polished piece of writing. Stories connect us as humans. They help us learn and process our experiences. Stories help us understand and feel what it means to be human and alive on this planet. When AI does the work, the human element is stripped away. Take away the human aspect, and you take away the story. Take away the story and you’re left with shapes on a page.
The work, the persistence, the failures, the inspirations—these are valuable components of our lived experiences. Don’t cheapen them by using gen-AI—especially if you’re hoping to be published. You cheat yourself out of your potential when you choose to use gen-AI.
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*Note: all em-dashes used in this post are my own. The em-dash is a useful piece of punctuation that AI has coopted. Society has deemed the em-dash “an AI-tell” and some writers now avoid using it. But remember, AI was trained on human-generated writing! AI stole the em-dash … and I will not be bullied into giving it up!
Want more? Here are a few good places to start your journey down the rabbit hole:
Author’s Guild “Human Authors Certification Program”
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Scraping NOT Allowed
Without limiting the author’s exclusive rights, any unauthorized use of this publication to train generative artificial intelligence (AI) is expressly prohibited. The author reserves all rights to license uses of this work for generative AI training and development of machine learning language models.
