As an experienced ghostwriter, I may well look like a biased party who’s supposed to promote writing books with people of my profession. Still, I’m going to stick mostly to the practical side of writing a book with AI, and you can draw your own conclusions from there.
Where AI Already Holds Its Own
In many fields, AI is steadily creating competition for living people. On the whole, the same is happening where texts get written. AI keeps getting better at it, and if you don’t set high professional standards, articles, for one, already look pretty decent. But that applies to short texts, where the computer mind confidently holds the context with some simple, even primitive, task in the prompt.
The First Problem: Inputs
Books are a different story entirely. They’re bigger and far more complex than an article, and everything there is much harder for AI. As it is for a person. For all the intelligence of our digital assistant, it works from what it’s given. So if you set out to write a book with AI, you need to feed it a lot of inputs, and you have to understand those inputs yourself.
This is where the first difficulties show up, because you have to know and understand those inputs. When I, as a professional writer, immediately ask about the audience, the goal, and so on, a person who has never written a book doesn’t carry that baggage, because they have no experience writing books.
Of course, you can craft a prompt so that the AI lays out the list of inputs as questions, and then answer them. It’s a good solution that lets you move in many unfamiliar directions. But you have to realize that this is a learning process. We step into something new, bring in AI, and learn, working through and absorbing new material.
The same thing happens, accordingly, in the process of writing the book. So if what you want is to just tell some GPT “do it” and be done, that won’t work. You need to understand what the inputs are, you need to decide what they should be, and you need to assemble all of it into a system whose parts don’t contradict one another. So whether you’re a writer or not, you’ll have to slowly become one.
Who Judges the Result
What are the odds it’ll be done well? It depends on your willingness to invest in the process and on your personal skills. Maybe it’ll turn out fine, maybe even very good. Or maybe it’ll be complete nonsense that shouldn’t be shown to anyone. Somebody has to evaluate it, and this is exactly where AI falls short. By default it’s more lenient than the people who will trash your book even when it has turned out decent. And demanding that it be critical very often makes the digital mind even worse than the haters, who by and large don’t care what they sling mud at or why. Finding the balance will again be up to you, and for that, once again, you’ll need to understand for yourself that the input is right, the text is good and logical, and the book’s ending is downright incredible.
That takes a certain level. But those who can judge the quality of a text at a high level don’t need this article. They’ll see everything for themselves once they try working on a book with AI. For those who are beginners, AI may turn out to be either a useful tool or something they’d be better off not using at all.
Without understanding the quality of what’s written or the quality of the inputs, a person writing a book with a digital assistant is moving in an unknown direction with their eyes shut, hoping the AI won’t write nonsense or glitch, which is very presumptuous.
The Second Problem: Context
There are more than enough memes about AI giving some ridiculous piece of advice. AI makes mistakes, and it shows most in processes where context has to be held. While writing or reading a book, a person doesn’t just memorize events and characters. They form an attitude. That attitude, in essence, is the foundation of context. And even having forgotten part of the book, a living reader or writer will still see images that give logic to actions and events. If AI loses or forgets part of the information, it can very easily head off somewhere else entirely.
And the insidious part is that everything will go on looking logical. The text will go on being decent. But it will already be a completely different story, about different characters and a different life. If the person writing a book with AI has a feel for context, they’ll point out right away: here, in this spot, you took a wrong turn. The assistant will adjust and rewrite, and you can get back on the rails you’ve laid and keep moving toward the finale.
But you’ll have to do this more than once. And you can only do it successfully if you have a feel for the text. If you don’t, the AI will pile on its hallucinations, and what comes out won’t be anything you could call a good book.
Creativity
The third part of what I wanted to talk about is inner substance. Creativity as such is something that lies beyond standardization and full understanding. Here and now, something comes to mind as if out of nowhere, and suddenly it’s forming into words, notes, or a marvelous combination of colors. It’s like a connection to something higher and boundless.
How well does AI fit into that? Even the smartest one? It’s hard to say, but either way you need to understand that only real creativity will turn this world upside down and capture people’s minds. And that kind of creativity can only come from within, where your soul is, not from outside, where there’s an artificial intelligence that simply doesn’t sense this matter.
So, Can You Write a Book with AI?
To sum up, here’s what I’ll say.
You can write a book with AI. But you need to understand that it will be limited by the level you yourself have. Anything that requires more will be beyond your understanding, which means that from there on you’ll be relying purely on chance and on the electronic god, who, for today, won’t send glitches or lost context down on the AI.
You cannot write a book of genius with AI, one that will go down in history. That lies on an entirely different plane, one governed by neither a PC nor a person. It is born on its own and controlled by no one.
You can use AI as a literary editor. In fact, you should. I do this with my own books and, with the clients’ permission, with the books I write for hire. I usually accept about 60 percent of its suggestions and its assorted fixes for typos and the like. That way I let myself stay in the creative process without worrying that I left out a letter or missed a comma somewhere.
Today’s realities call for using AI in many fields. There’s work for it in writing a book, too. But I’d still recommend writing it yourself or with a professional writer. And only then handing it to a digital assistant for analysis. While still keeping your own intellect in charge. People are still cooler. For now. We’ll see.
Want to give it a try — head to the services page. We’ll talk, and maybe even write something.
