The Case Against Writing with AI

“Of all that is written, I love only what a person has written with his blood.” Friedrich Nietzsche

There’s a chance I am going to sound like a luddite who waxes nostalgically about the good, ole days when we walked to school ten miles, in the snow, uphill both ways. Philosophically, I’m not opposed to innovation. Far from it. Even when it comes to AI, it’s likely that many great uses for AI will become increasingly more evident as time goes by. But I strongly feel that creative writing is not one of them.

Let me qualify my opposition to writing with AI. AI is perfect for soulless, tedious work. And let’s be clear, I’m not using ‘soulless’ as an insult. There are plenty of soulless things that have practical use. If you are writing a technical manual, by all means use AI to your heart’s content. If your writing revolves only around conveying information and presenting data, then AI can probably be your best friend. But creative writing is a different beast entirely.

The writing I’m interested in is not purely a means to an end. It’s not just about showing off technical skills in wordsmithing. It’s about pouring your soul onto the page. The process of writing is as important as the final product. Staring at a blank page for an uncomfortably long time allows a writer to dig deep in their own emotions and forces them to ask themselves why they are putting themselves through that agony. Finding an answer that makes it all worth it is precisely what makes writing worth reading. Writing, to me, is not about stringing together a few pretty-sounding sentences. It’s an emotional journey taking you to the core of who you are as a human being. Another person can’t do it for you, and AI most definitely can’t do it for you. It’s like asking someone else to lift weights for you, and expecting to get stronger from their effort. That’s simply not the way it works.

I didn’t become a writer because I wanted to craft prompts for a machine. So, if you want to be a writer, be a damn writer. Using AI for creative writing to me is worse than cheating. It’s a way to sell out the Muse, and shrinking the human spirit.

At the end of the day, AI may crank out a perfectly readable book in a millisecond, but it will never know what it means to bleed on a page.