September 9, 2025

What Does It Mean to Be an Author in an AI World?

Apple on books with text: Deepen Your Craft with Resident Writing Coach Jami Gold (at Writers Helping Writers)

It’s time for another one of my guest posts over at Angela Ackerman and Becca Puglisi’s Writers Helping Writers site. As one of their Resident Writing Coaches, I’ve previously shared:

With this turn for another coaching article at WHW, I’m looking at what it means to be an author in a world with artificial intelligence. Let’s explore of couple of ways to value our humanity as authors…

The Publishing Industry Has Always Been Hard, But…

Many authors I know are struggling with motivation to write, given so much chaos in current events. The effects of artificial intelligence (AI) on authors and the publishing industry are top of mind for many this week, with the news of the Anthropic settlement (and discovering that many traditional publishers didn’t follow through on copyrighting authors’ books, leaving them ineligible for the settlement payout).

(Note: If you published before July 2022, you and your books are potentially included in the settlement—I’m pretty sure I am (and I’m a nobody!). Fill out the form here to provide your information and receive notifications and settlement payments if it’s determined you and your work are part of the lawsuit.)

Have you submitted your books for the Anthropic AI lawsuit settlement? Share on X

Having our books pirated has always been a risk in the industry, but while some worried about the effect on their sales, others decided those readers never would have paid for our books anyway and dismissed the worry. However, when AI companies willfully and knowingly downloaded libraries of stolen books to get free training data for their software, the scope and effects of the risk changed.

Now that AI software is able to publish countless-and-never-ending books after being trained on our work, we’re having to compete with software that’s stolen our ideas, techniques, writing styles, etc. That’s enough to make many writers despair: “Why bother writing and publishing if my work is just going to be stolen and used to compete against me?”

That’s absolutely a valid question. And while I haven’t been writing as much due to my many health issues, I won’t claim that this AI mess hasn’t contributed to my lack of progress—or lack of motivation to make progress. So yes, the publishing industry has always been difficult, but things seem more difficult than ever before.

Unfortunately, I don’t have any magic answers for us. There are some groups who are attempting to help authors stand out or be protected in this new world. For example, Created By Humans has a manifesto for the ethical use of our work for training data, and The Authors Guild has offered protection tips and created a Human Authored certification. But in general, there’s not much we can do other than choose to give up or choose to keep going—out of spite potentially. *smile*

Writers Helping Writers: Resident Writing Coach Program

Assuming we decide to keep going, one thing we can do is lean into our humanity to create stories that deeply and authentically dig into the human experience with relatable situations and characters. We can especially focus on areas of storytelling that are weaknesses for AI “written” stories.

That’s what I’m exploring in my guest post at WHW this time around:

Differentiating Our Stories from AI Slop: Use Context to Deepen Our Writing

Come visit my guest post, where I’m sharing a few ideas about using our strengths to beat out AI’s weaknesses, including:

understanding the weaknesses of AI when it comes to context
why AI’s answers (“writing”) gives the most predictable story elements
how AI can only make connections it’s seen before
how it’s more important than ever to avoid the obvious and predictable
11 questions to push ourselves to deepen context and connections
how using subtext can help make connections for readers that AI can’t do
how focusing on our unique characters will help us write unique stories

Then, come back here to see what I’ve decided will be my personal AI policy for this site and my fiction writing…

Do You Have an AI Policy?

The second thing we can do if we’re not giving up is decide what our personal policy is when it comes to AI. Will we…

Avoid all uses of AI?
Share AI-generated content (images, etc.) on social media? What if it’s “just for fun”?
Use AI for creating our cover more cheaply?
Use an AI narrator to enable us to publish an audiobook (that we could otherwise never afford)?
Use AI to help generate story or plot ideas?
Use AI to help outline or develop ideas?
Use AI for text suggestions or proofreading help?
Use AI to help us write, especially “the boring parts,” like descriptions?
Use AI to help us create marketing materials?
and so on…

What's your personal AI policy? Share on X

We’re not all going to agree on the answers, but we all should put thought into these questions because they’ll affect our career. Many of those questions come with ethical and legal quandaries that we don’t want to wander into unprepared or uninformed.

For example, many readers or other authors will assume than an author with an AI-created cover has used AI to write their book as well. Assumptions like that can lead to blacklisting or bad reputations.

Case Study: My AI Policy

My personal AI policy—that applies to this blog, my fiction work, and to any guest posters here on my blog—is governed by two beliefs I hold:

I don’t want to use AI that exploits other creators or work stolen from them.
I don’t want to use AI in ways that undermines the basic idea of being a writer:
We are writers because we write, investing our words with our unique perspectives and qualities, and our work should be a product of us.

Given those two beliefs, I’ve written up my policy and included it on my Policies page here on my blog. Or you can simply read it below:

The legality, ethical implications, and morality of artificial intelligence (A.I. or AI)—such as ChatGPT and other tools—and its use in creative endeavors will be debated for years to come. In the meantime, I’ve developed this policy for the use of AI, AI tools/resources, and AI-generated content on my site, both for myself and for my guest posters.

In general, I allow applications that focus on AI-assistance technology, but not AI-content-generation applications that remove us from the actual writing process (or take advantage of copying/plagiarizing other creatives and their stolen content). We are writers because we write, investing our words with our unique perspectives and qualities, and our work should be a product of us.

Everyone (but especially us as creatives) should respect the work that goes into creating content and not participate in the exploitation/plagiarizing of others’ creative work for AI content generation.

AI doesn’t actually “create” content, as it literally doesn’t have a “creative bone in its body.” Rather AI has been trained on hundreds of thousands of stolen books, fanfic stories, blog posts, images, and academic articles (including much of my work) without consent, credit, or compensation for the original creators.

Essentially, all AI-generated content has been copied/plagiarized and cobbled together from original sources with minor modifications. Every “idea” or “insight” AI offers must have already existed in its training data, as it’s not possible at its current technology level to come up with anything new. It can only mimic what it’s seen before, so therefore, everything it generates is an imitation of a creative’s stolen work.

With this in mind, the specifics of my AI Policy are as follows:

- Allowed:
  
  AI may be used to help decrease our work at the non-writing stages of the writing process, including: brainstorming, limited outlining/developing of ideas, editing feedback (such as suggestions for rewording a sentence or difficult passage), proofreading, etc. None of these stages in the writing process remove us from the actual creative act of writing.
  
  However, even at these stages, all AI-provided suggestions must be reworked and/or rewritten in our voice and style, other than for very limited exceptions that have no other options. Although AI may be used to help our efficiency, in general, we should treat AI-provided content like material that can’t be quoted, only paraphrased or reworded, as it exploits stolen content even for these uses. Rare exceptions may be made for quotes specified as being sourced from AI or for single phrases that grammatically can’t be reworded another way, etc.
- Allowed with Caution:
  
  AI may be used with caution in regards to research, as all information learned through AI should be verified by reading actual sources. Also keep in mind the different purposes of various AI tools: chatbots (the most common, but not reliable for serious research or sources), research-specific tools, editing and rewording tools, etc.
  
  The current technology level of AI chatbot platforms is essentially advanced “auto-complete”—anticipating what we want. As part of that “giving us what we want” behavior, AI chatbots have been known to make up information and even sources. We must verify all AI-provided research information by reading actual accurate sources to ensure the information exists and is valid/correct.
- Not Allowed:
  
  No AI-generated content is allowed on my site, as all AI-generated content exploits creatives and their original content to produce “knock-off” AI content. This restriction includes a prohibition against AI-generated images, as well as using AI-provided content at the actual writing stages.

Still not sure? Here are a few examples illustrating the difference between Allowed and Not Allowed uses of AI-Provided Content:

- Not Allowed: Using an AI tool to create content during the writing stage.
- Not Allowed: Using an AI tool to create images for this site.
- Allowed: Using an AI tool for suggestions at non-writing stages (e.g., brainstorming or proofreading), as long as any AI-provided content has been reworked/rewritten to make the idea unique to our voice, style, and perspective.
- Allowed: Using AI-provided suggestions during the writing stage to trigger our own unique ideas, which would naturally be different enough from the AI-provided content to reflect our own thoughts, insights, voice, and style. (That is, it’s allowed to use an AI tool during the writing stage if no content is used, and the tool’s suggestions are simply triggering our own thoughts.)

In addition to exploiting other creatives for their stolen work, AI-generated content is potentially uncopyrightable, often wordier than necessary, harmful for our SEO, etc. Therefore, my policy is simple: No AI-generated content may be used in material for this site. Any content or information must be our own or legally used from a legitimate non-AI source.

Guest posters (or potential guest posters) with questions about whether a specific AI tool, application, or use are allowed on this site should contact me directly.

Obviously, that’s a long, explanatory policy, and it might not stay that way exactly. But I wanted to explain not just my policy, but also my reasons for my policy. I wanted others who might not have thought about the bigger issues with AI to hear about them and potentially consider their own feelings on the matter. I wanted my policy to feel genuine enough that others would feel my humanity and know I’m committed to avoiding AI exploitation (and hopefully be less likely to accuse me of using AI simply because I love using em-dashes *sigh*).

Yet despite all that negativity, I’m not anti-AI when used in ethical and helpful ways. One of my family members graduated with an AI degree, but gave up when the industry turned into a get-rich-quick scam rather than focusing on ways to better our world. In short, the policy is so long (maybe it’s more of a manifesto?) because I put serious thought to the questions of what uses of AI I would and would not be okay with, both from my guest posters and from myself.

Final Thoughts on Being an Author in an AI World

If you skipped over my guest post link above earlier, I encourage you to visit there now, if for no other reason that I also share links to some of Angela Ackerman’s helpful posts about AI. Her first post gives 6 thoughts about how to thrive in a world of AI-generated books (and many of the comments have additional helpful tidbits. And her second post highlights 5 ways to use your humanity to outshine AI-generated books. Both of those posts are helpful and encouraging.

So while I understand the temptation to despair (believe me, I do!), I hope that we’ll choose to continue on our path and push ourselves to new heights in our writing skills and storytelling. *smile*

Have you felt despair in the current publishing environment? If so, what will help you decide to continue (spite is a valid option)? Have you considered those questions about AI usage, or do you have an AI policy? Do you have any other thoughts or questions about this topic? (My WHW posts are limited in word count, but I’m happy to go deeper here if anyone wants more info!)