When It's Okay To Use AI To Write Your Novel

First rule of Write Club: Don't use AI to write your novel.

Second rule of Write Club: DON'T use AI to write your novel.

Seriously, don't use it for your creative writing. Ever. Except...in cases when it's not writing for you.

It's no secret that the publishing industry frowns upon authors using AI to write their books. Not just frowns — spurns those who try to pass off any piece of auto-generated prose as their own. Creative writing is a human endeavor, to be held sacred as an art and not a get-rich quick scheme that degrades the quality of the industry by flooding it with soulless AI slop. After all, if AI writes it for you, you're not a writer. And it should be noted that AI-written novels aren't covered by copyright law, meaning publishers have no legal protection to prevent others from printing and selling that book.

However...

There are many ways in which we use AI in our lives that does not break the sacred trust of authorship. Ways in which we can bring a novel to life without crossing ethical boundaries. Here are my thoughts on three of these areas.

An AI-generated image of an AI writing a novel,

1. Research...that's verified

Many authors conduct background research for their stories, whether it be for creating a historically accurate setting or understanding the toll a disease takes on the body. Not every author is trekking to their local library to read tomes of research in person. Many don't have the budget to jet set to some exotic local and mingle with the locals for a true understanding of the environment. Writers use the internet.

They search and read. They find articles that recommend books or youtube videos. It's fast (usually), free (sometimes), and convenient. The internet takes the hours, days, and weeks needed to laboriously pore over research books and findings, and compresses them into minutes of skimming summaries served fresh on one's computer screen.

AI, usually in form of Large Language Models (LLMs), can take that search and compress the timeframe even smaller. People can find so much more, then easily download it to their manuscript bible's research section for easy keeping. Using AI for research is perfectly reasonable and ethical, as long as you abide by two rules:

1. Don't copy and paste what the AI chatbot gives you directly into you story and pass it off as your own writing. Attributions discovered are fine, provided they're properly cited.

2. Verify the information. That warrants restating. VERIFY THE INFORMATION. The LLMs don't actually know everything. They find what they can and fill in the gaps with a best guess, which is sometimes wrong. This presentation of wrong information is what is commonly referred to as an AI hallucination (although confabulation is probably the more correct term based on what it's actually doing).

When Claude made up a quote attribution instead of referencing a real one.

2. Plotting, not pantsing

Plotters like to plan the story. A plan requires organization, options, origination, and opinions (didn't think I could fit four 'O' words in there). For three of these, AI should be okay. Can you guess which ones? (Hint: it's not 'opinions')

Organization

AI is great at organizational tasks. It can collect all your artifacts and bring them together in a tidy space. If you forget a character detail you wrote in a previous chapter, like which floor your character works on in their office building, you could ask a chatbot, like Claude, to search your manuscript and remind you what it was. In this regard, it really is just a tool aiding you in doing your creative thing. No issues.

Options

For those who are more experienced with LLMs, you could use AI (possibly agents) to help you consider optional paths for your story. This is where the ethical line can blur if you're not careful, so proceed with caution. Were you to treat the AI as a programmatic tool that simply interpreted your writing so far in order to pose questions to you, that would still be you making the decisions.

For example, if I outlined a plot in which my hero is a Black man in 1950s Alabama who gets pulled over by a police officer, I could ask the AI for a list of pros and cons for a hero like this to act defiant toward an unjust traffic stop. The options presented would be points to consider, in which I would still be making the decisions and ultimately choosing a direction I think is best based on the information I have. It's like an advanced spreadsheet or notebook for thinking through the options.

I see this in the same light as using a writing craft instructional book like Writing The Breakout Novel Workbook by Donald Maass. It helps guide you through the process without writing anything for you.

But of course, here's my caveat — if the AI starts crafting the plot for you, then you're in dangerous territory, and I'd recommended retracing your steps to where you last left off from your own thoughts.

Origination

Another way you could use AI would be in providing the tools to create original ideas for the plot. Creativity often stems from synthesis, bringing ideas together to form a new one. Ask the AI to read you the latest headlines, then (you) craft stories from that. Tell it to give you random situations, then (you) bring two of them together. Inspiration comes for many places, and AI can be one of them.

Opinions

Here is where I would avoid AI use in plotting, and tell AI to keep its opinions to itself. Once you start asking an LLM what should happen next in your story, you've begun ceding creative control to the bots.

Pantsers

For those who prefer to write by the seat of their pants, just do your thing and write whatever flows in your crafty little heads. No AI necessary. Just avoid it unless you want to use it for the 'Origination' options mentioned above.

3. Analysis is fabulous

AI as a tool for analyzing your manuscript is a must-have feature. Unless you're an old-school, typewriter enthusiast, you already use a form of AI. Spellcheckers and grammar-checkers are built-in features for any word processing software (assuming you don't turn it off). It automatically underlines incorrect spellings or poor phrase constructions and recommends something better.

No one will fault you for accepting the correct spelling of word when the computer presents you with a quick-fix to your accidental typo. I doubt anyone considers that to be an example of AI writing on your behalf. It's just a tool that presents you with an option, in which you're the decision-maker.

But today's top software goes above and beyond with latest AI capabilities. ProWritingAid offers some incredible analysis tools that read your manuscript and provide reports for common mistakes writers make, such as use of passive voice or sentence length variation.

But wait, it gets better.

In 2024, I attended a virtual lecture by author Ken Liu given to Stanford students and alumni, in which he wished AI would be good enough to be a beta reader so he could get feedback on his manuscript drafts. ProWritingAid's beta reader and chapter analysis tools do exactly that. They aren't a full replacement for a quality beta reader or critique partner, but they give insightful feedback on what you've written. It's scary how good it is. And it doesn't offer to rewrite it for you, but rather gives you insight into what worked and what didn't so that you as the author can choose how you want to incorporate that feedback, if at all.

For my manuscript, it has been a useful tool in analyzing story structure and asking insightful questions about characters. I then consider the data and revise with my own words.

Sample of ProWritingAid's chapter critique analyzing my first chapter.

When it's okay for AI to write for you

Novels written by AI are here, and they probably aren't going away given that it only takes basic prompting skills to create one. But that's okay, as long as the "author" is transparent about it and publishes to AI-specified outlets.

There are dedicated forums for AI-generated books. While this may not be most people's cup of tea, there is some appetite for it. What's good about this is that it promotes transparency, where the author is upfront about AI use. This is the case where AI-written is completely acceptable: ethically, legally, technically.

The other avenue for AI writing would be for areas where the goal is basic communication, like emails...or blogs. Any attempt at monetizing AI-written content should have it disclosed that the content was indeed, AI-generated.

The Takeaway

Use AI as a tool, not a ghostwriter.

Disclosure: All words written in this post were 100% written by me, Daniel, a human.