Not one word.
AI in this context largely refers to Large Language Models (LLMs), such as Claude, ChatGPT, Gemeni, Deepseek, and many others. These AI tools are rapidly evolving and growing in complexity and capability. In fact, the true AI experts who help create these tools state – correctly, in my opinion – that AI will be the LAST tool humanity ever creates.
All this to say, the use of AI for book authoring is becoming trivially easy to do.
I have seen the deluge of AI content first hand. Particularly in the corporate space where I work, as increasingly powerful AI tools are becoming accessible to me to help with market research, content creation, data analysis, or any number of other tasks. Perhaps I am showing my age in my reluctance to simply believe the data generated by these solutions, or that when my manager asks me for an analysis of software performance engineering practices he wanted me to actually lean on the nearly thirty years of experience I have and not just prompt Claude or whatever and copy paste that response. Yet when I do this work, I often find myself running it back through Claude to analyze and research my assumptions and points to highlight things I may have missed or otherwise failed to act on.
Increasingly, these tools save me a lot of time – hours, sometimes days – in my professional career. They’re useful the same way a knife can be useful, and with some caution can solve all sorts of problems.
On the other hand, I was horrified when Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) put out an announcement (documented here on Publishers Weekly) that limits the number of changes a publisher can make to three per day.
Three books. Per day.
Clearly some people have a different idea on what these AI tools should be used for. I understand that some extremely large publishers may have hundreds or even thousands of books in their library, but… how often does a book get updated? I doubt this use case was what spurred KDP to make this change.
So this is my promise to you, my readers. Not a single word in any of my books, ever, will be generated by AI.
Now, I do use AI to help with my writing in terms of idea generation and story structure. I tell it what I want (incorporate this subplot for Kraven into the existing outline, for example), and it reworks the story beats for me. Then I start writing and begin to stray wildly off that track, and readjust. Another example was near the end of Futility of Defense, when Krell was doing something he knew to be wrong, the first drafts were very passive. A little prompting on AI, and it gave me ideas that were garbage but that spurred my own thoughts, moving them in a different direction. In this way, I find AI to be extremely powerful and useful, helping me structure my thoughts and ideas.
That’s the line that I draw. They’re my thoughts and ideas. They’re the story beats and characters I have already created. AI does not get to write my books. That’s my role as an author.
The image I used for this post came from rawpixel.com on Freepik, and is being used as part of their free-to-use policies. Hopefully I’m not inadvertently stealing someone’s art.