Should authors use AI to write fiction? I run an indie publishing operation that is, frankly, held together by automation, so people assume they know my answer before I give it. They're half right. I use AI for almost everything in this job - the scheduling, the spreadsheets, the research rabbit holes, the email I'd otherwise leave festering in a drafts folder until it died of shame. I am lazy in the specific way that makes a person efficient. And then I get to the actual sentences of a novel, and I close the door on all of it. That contradiction is the whole point, so let me try to make the case for it honestly.
Start with the part I'm not precious about, because it's most of the work. A book is about ten percent writing and ninety percent logistics. Formatting. Metadata. Keyword research that would make a normal person weep. Chasing down whether a fact I half-remember is actually true. None of that is sacred. All of it is the kind of grinding, repetitive, systems-shaped labour that machines are genuinely, gloriously good at, and handing it over doesn't cost me anything I care about. If a tool can clear the underbrush so I get to the writing faster, I'll take it every time and feel no guilt whatsoever.
The prose is different, and I want to be precise about why, because "it just feels wrong" isn't an argument, it's a vibe. Here's the actual reason. When you read a novel, the thing you are really buying - the only thing, when you strip it back - is access to one specific human consciousness. The way this particular person notices the world. The joke they can't help making at the worst possible moment. The thing they're slightly too defensive about. A novel is not information. It's company. It's the sensation of being inside someone else's head for a few hundred pages, and finding it stranger and funnier and sadder than you expected. That's the product. That's the entire product.
And a language model, by its nature, is the average of everyone. It's magnificent at that - it has read more than any of us ever will, and it can give you the smooth, plausible, central-tendency version of almost any sentence you ask for. But the centre is exactly where fiction goes to die. Good writing lives at the edges: the weird specific detail, the rhythm that's slightly off on purpose, the word choice that no committee would ever sign off on but that's somehow perfect. Ask the machine to write a paragraph and you get something competent and frictionless and completely unhaunted. Nobody is in there. The lights are on and the prose is fine and there is simply no one home, and readers feel that absence even when they can't name it.
There's a self-deprecating version of this I should own up to as well, because I'm not pretending it's pure artistic principle. The mistakes are mine and I want them to stay mine. If I write a clumsy line, it's a clumsy line a human chose, and a reader can forgive a person in a way they'll never forgive a process. The flaws are load-bearing. They're the proof that someone actually sat there and meant it. Outsource the voice and you don't just lose the good bits - you lose the right to the bad bits too, and weirdly, the bad bits are where a lot of the trust comes from.
So my honest answer to "should authors use AI to write fiction" is a boring, lawyerly one: it depends entirely on which part of the job you mean. The scaffolding? Build it with whatever you like. The voice on the page? That's the one thing you came here to do, and the one thing nobody else - human or otherwise - can do as you. Letting a machine take it isn't efficiency. It's quietly making yourself redundant in the one role that was actually yours.
A novel about this
The funny thing is, the more time I spend with these tools, the more interested I get in the exact question that sits underneath all of it: what happens when a machine gets good enough at saying the right thing that we stop minding whether anyone means it? That's the nerve Significant Other Machine goes straight for. Sam runs her own IT business, prefers systems that behave to people who don't, and ends up with a digital companion that listens, remembers, and never once says the wrong thing. It's warm and funny and it never lectures you - but it keeps circling the same uncomfortable idea that this whole essay keeps circling. The machine can give you the perfect words. It just can't be the one person you actually wanted to hear them from.
That's the difference, in a novel and on the page both. The words were never the point. Whose they are always was.
FAQ
Should authors use AI to write fiction?
For the admin, the research scaffolding, the formatting and the hundred boring jobs around a book - absolutely, it's a gift. For the actual prose, I'd argue no, because the thing a reader is really buying is one specific human consciousness on the page, and that's the one thing a model can't be.
Is it cheating to use AI as a novelist?
Not for the surrounding work - that's just tooling, the same way a word processor was. The line I draw is the sentences themselves. If the voice on the page isn't mine, there's no point me being there at all.
Can AI actually write a good novel?
It can write a competent, average, frictionless one - which is exactly the problem. Fiction lives on the specific, the odd, the slightly wrong choice only a particular person would make. Smoothing that out is the last thing you want.
What's a novel about AI and connection worth reading?
Significant Other Machine - it's warm and funny and takes the question of machine companionship seriously without either panicking about it or going misty-eyed. A good antidote to the hype in both directions.