How I Use AI as a Writer
I know, I know. You’re appalled! I’m not a “real writer”! Gather the villagers with their torches and pitchforks!
Complaining about AI is the 2026 equivalent of loudly proclaiming your hatred of Nickelback in public spaces.
What we call Artificial Intelligence (which isn’t quite accurate to what it currently is, but that’s a different topic) is arguably the most hot button issue at the moment. We are still at an early-to-mid stage of development of this technology, but already jobs are starting to be affected.
At the forefront of that are people who work in arts and entertainment.
For writers, the advent of print-on-demand self-publishing services freed us from the shackles of the publishing industry and literary agents. But then came ChatGPT. Overnight, scam artists found an easy way to mass-produce books and flood the market. The average writer would be lucky to publish one or two books a year. But ChatGPT can produce a script in seconds. It doesn’t matter if you’re a great writer. You’re competing in an arena where you’re dwarfed by the sheer volume of the competition. The difference in quality is irrelevant.
This is a huge problem. I agree without question.
So you’re asking yourself “well if you agree, then why the hell are you using AI to write?” This is a good question. But a better question would be how am I using AI to help with my writing?
Artificial Intelligence is treated like it is the boogeyman. You are thinking about it wrong and you are using it wrong. AI is a tool. A very advanced tool, but still a tool. A hammer can be used to build your family a home or to bludgeon your neighbor to death. The tool is not the problem. What matters is how you use it.
For my first book, Earning My Ears: My Adventures in the Disney College Program, I had a multi-tiered editing system. I personally read the book at least twenty times. Then I asked my friend Jak to be my editor. Then I had three different people proofread it. Even after all that, I still found two errors after the book went to print.
Recently, I decided I want to put out new editions of both of my books. I made the changes I wanted to make. But then, instead of getting an editor or proofreaders, I fed the manuscript into Claude.
My instructions to Claude were specific. Read the manuscript and annotate any potential problems, up to and including grammar, typos or story problems. The AI program was used to give me a diagnosis, not to operate.
In less than a minute, Claude gave me a list of changes to make. Some were grammatical or typographical errors no one caught. Others were issues that it had with my story.
When it came to story problems, I looked at each suggestion on an individual basis and decided whether I agreed, disagreed or at least saw that there was room for improvement with my prose.
Not a single word in anything I write is generated by a program or crafted by anyone other than me.
My point is, people feel the need to deal in absolutes these days. Every opinion must be hyper-partisan. But in your zeal to take down skynet, you’re missing two important details.
The first is that Pandora’s spirits cannot be put back in her box. Ever-evolving AI is very here to stay. (Or perhaps not. I have some theories about that, though those are also not germane to this treatise.)
But more importantly, you are missing out on an important tool that can improve your writing and your workflow. AI is not simply a search engine or a tool for spontaneous content generation.
Its true purpose is to improve our lives in ways many of you haven’t realized. And even those of us who are using it have barely scraped the surface of its potential. Studying Claude has been a demonstrable benefit to my life and my work, whether as an editor, a researcher or a sounding board for me to work through a problem.
I’ve yet to see a downside to using this tool. I use it ethically and I try to inform other people how to do the same.
But ultimately it isn’t my decision.
Use it or don’t. It’s your life and your loss. But making snarky comments about it is a waste of your time. And frankly it’s kind of annoying.
#ArtificialIntelligence #AI #ChatGPT #OpenAI #Grok #Claude #anthropic #artsandentertainment #writer
