Before we begin, I want to clarify something. When I say “AI writers,” I’m not talking about people who use Grammarly, ProWritingAid, or any writing tools where you are primarily responsible for most of the writing.

Grammarly and ProWritingAid do not do the work for you, though they can enhance what you have already written. Their suggestions are often stupid and wrong, which is why I encourage newer writers to avoid them until you have the basics down. Still, they do require you to put in effort.

By “AI writers,” I mean people who prompt generative AI to do all or most of the writing. Or people who write poorly and then put that into ChatGPT, which then “cleans it up” for them (aka lies). You are my primary audience. Listen up.

Give up. Stop doing this. Find a new hobby.

That’s my primary message to you. Give up now, before you waste even more time and resources on this endeavor.

I know this is extremely harsh. It’s meant to be. But ultimately, I say this for your benefit.

When you are using AI, you are telling us that you can’t think for yourself and don’t want to try.

I look down on people who use AI because, to me, it signifies laziness and a lack of critical thinking skills. Most other writers do, too.

You are debasing yourself when you use AI. Whether you like it or not, you are proclaiming this:

“I think so poorly of myself that I believe a heartless, soulless, lying, hallucinating machine can tell this story better than I can. My stories don’t really matter, or I would be compelled to write them myself.”

“I am too impatient to learn the skills necessary to tell this story. I want instant satisfaction without doing the hard work.”

“Artistic integrity doesn’t matter to me. The human element of writing is pointless. I don’t want to explore myself or others. I don’t care about learning.”

“I don’t have the ability to find writing advice, to ask a more experienced writer, to find books on craft that can guide me. I refuse to expend any effort to write my stories.”

“Rather than overcoming challenges, I would rather immediately give up and look for the easiest possible solution. I have a low frustration threshold. I can’t calm down and think things through.”

“I am completely helplesss. Someone else has to spoonfeed me answers, both in writing and in life overall. I do not want to improve myself as a person, to learn or to grow. I just want to do things with as little effort as possible because I don’t believe in self-improvement.”

“My self-esteem is too bad to handle criticism, which is why I let a machine do all the work for me so I can easily dismiss anyone’s criticism as the machine’s fault. And I cannot be bothered to improve my self-esteem, just like I can’t be bothered to do the hard work necessary to succeed as a writer.”

Those are all harsh things. And they are all true. That is exactly what I think – and what others think – when they see you crowing about using AI.

Why do you think so badly of yourself? Why do you think that you’re incapable? And why won’t you do anything to make it better?

Life cannot be outsourced, no matter how much you want the easy solution to every problem. Eventually you will come across something that you have to figure out on your own. If you have not gained the ability to problem-solve, to research, to work through frustration, then you’re going to have a complete and utter meltdown the first time you face a true challenge.

Learning how to write, just like learning any other skill, teaches you those things. It sets you up for a better future because it forces patience, creativity, research, and persistence.

I feel bad for you if you believe that there are any easy outs in life. There aren’t. If you want something, you must achieve it on your own. Better to learn this lesson now.

If learning how to write is too hard, then you don’t have a passion for it.

I do not use AI in my writing and never will. Not even the excerpts for my blog posts, which is why I occasionally find typos in them which I hurriedly fix before posting them anywhere.

Everything in The Eirenic Verses was written by me. I do use ProWritingAid, but only to point out things like glue words or overly difficult paragraphs. Most of the time, its suggestions are bad, but it correctly identified a potential issue that I didn’t catch. I don’t take its suggested rewrites; I workshop ways to fix it myself.

For me, it is basically just a supercharged spellchecker and nothing more.

Why? Because I actually enjoy writing. The entire process, from start to finish, is enjoyable to me.

People who like doing something do not look for shortcuts. They do not want some machine to do the work for them because doing it themselves is the whole point.

For example, one of my hobbies is knitting. There are machines for this; they’ve existed for longer than I’ve been knitting, which is about 20 years now. I’ve never used them because the whole point of knitting is to do it myself.

I derive incredible satisfaction from making something with my own two hands. Over the years, I’ve taught myself many skills, including multiple bind-offs, intarsia, entrelac, short rows, and mosaic stitches. Of course I don’t succeed the first time, which makes it all the more amazing when I do figure out the technique and make something beautiful.

Why would I want to remove half of the joy? The point isn’t entirely the finished product: it’s working hard, trying new things, and pushing myself to achieve more. It’s failing, then succeeding, then marveling at how far I’ve come.

If all you want is the finished piece, then you don’t really enjoy writing as an activity. You want something to show off. And that’s not the point of writing. The point is the hard work.

You are denying yourself the pleasure of self-discovery.

I learn something new about writing every time I read or write. Every piece, no matter how small, teaches me something about craft.

But more importantly for personal growth, I learn something new about myself every time I write something.

AI writing is soulless; it doesn’t have anything about you in it. What are you learning about yourself? What are you infusing about yourself into the work? Nothing. Because you let a machine do it for you. A plagiarism machine scoured the internet, picked a bunch of random stolen content, and vomited it out in accordance with your wishes.

My third novel, Funeral of Hopes is deeply, painfully personal. Through Orrinir Relickim, I was able to confront my feelings about being estranged from my abusive father.

Orrinir depicts when the brain knows that the abuser will never change, but the heart wishes so much that they would. There’s a push-pull between “I want to make you feel bad” versus “I want you to acknowledge and praise me.”

And, of course, all those things are incredibly hard to say, especially for a strong soldier like Orrinir. So one has to learn how to show these things without the character monologuing about their bad vibes all the time.

How would a machine ever do that? It can’t. You have to feel the feelings before you can put it into words. You’re stymying your own self-growth by refusing to explore those parts of yourself.

Machines cannot accurately depict the subtle nuances of human behavior, making its work less interesting.

Writing is also a way to explore the world around me, especially psychology. By studying other people and myself, I can more accurately reflect humanity in my work.

AI simply does not depict nuances. It doesn’t know how, and I doubt it ever will.

ChatGPT will never understand the difference between touching someone’s hand or patting them on the shoulder because to it, those are both expressions of companionship. But the two gestures are not really the same.

Handshakes are a gesture of trust. This gesture is at least 7 million years old and was originally used to prove that you were unarmed. Not only was your hand empty, but pulling your arm up and down would dislodge any hidden weapons, too. Plus, it’s hard to get away from a handshake, so you don’t want to give them out without at least a baseline level of ease.

Racheting up the closeness level, we get to holding hands. There’s a deep intimacy about squeezing someone’s hand; it’s one of the most sensitive parts of the body, and not being able to use such an essential limb suggests a bit of vulnerability. You hold someone’s hand when words alone cannot express how much you love and care for someone.

In contrast, patting someone’s shoulder is a more impersonal gesture, often done to a child by an adult. You don’t have to care about someone much to pat their shoulder because they’re not temporarily surrendering use of their body part to you. For many people, being patted on the shoulder by someone other than a partner or relative seems patronizing; it can even feel threatening, especially if the person comes up behind you and you don’t know each other very well.

So they have completely different levels of intimacy and trust. People pat my shoulder all the time and it doesn’t really mean anything, but I’d be very surprised (and offended) if someone I didn’t know suddenly held my hand.

This is, of course, presuming a Western context. Different gestures mean different things around the world, and reflecting this can help a story feel more rooted.

To a real writer, these tiny gestural nuances are fascinating and provide such depth to their work. I love thinking about these things, and learning about them has made me far more mindful about the way I move through the world. I notice the way people point their feet during a conversation, how they angle their bodies, when they gesture with their hands or not. I also consider what peoples’ body language says about them, both in the moment and overall.

This deeper exploration of human behavior has made me a more attentive listener, a more vibrant conversationalist, and a better friend. I can read peoples’ moods and respond appropriately so that I offer my loved ones what they need in the moment, even if they don’t tell me. I’m able to identify manipulative behavior, to assert boundaries, to stand up for myself.

Why would you want to deny yourself the opportunity to learn these things and utilize them in your work? You’re missing out on so much by letting a machine regurgitate thousands of stolen works on your behalf.

Writing is nowhere near as lucrative as you seem to believe – especially for AI writing.

Let’s talk about the tech bros who want to shit out a book in a day and make millions of dollars.

Sorry, bub. They lied to you.

Most authors do not make that much. Of course there are exceptions, but the majority of us have to work a day job in addition to our writing. My fiction writing operates at a loss right now, and I wouldn’t be able to publish at all if I weren’t a business communications writer during the day.

Heartless, mediocre writing is going to make even less. Yes, you may gain the benefit of quantity over quality, but the instant that people get a sniff of AI-generated writing, they will rat you out and your numbers will plummet.

Let’s look at an author who uses AI. Here’s the first novel in a series, before readers started to cotton onto it:

And here’s the most recent one, released back in July 2024.

Look at that extreme dropoff in ratings. It’s been out for well over six months now, so there should be way more than just eight ratings.

But people got tired of the derivative bullshit and gave up on the series; only a few remained to warn others about the terrible AI writing. There were only three reviews, two of which complained about the AI.

Now, it’s true that sequels usually get less reviews than the first book. This happens even amongst well-known authors writing a series. People already left their comments on the first book, and they don’t feel compelled to leave another one on the next instalment. Brandon Sanderson went from 76,000 reviews on the first book in The Stormlight Archives to just 12,000 on the fifth one.

But going from over 200 down to just eight?? That’s horrifying. It shows you AI writing is bland and tiring. People don’t want to read the same thing over and over, but that’s all AI can do. Eventually they get fed up, and you get significantly diminished returns.

In general, 5% to 10% of readers will leave reviews. If we extrapolate that in the most generous way, it means that Vera Winters sold up to 2,600 copies of the first Starlight Sanctum book but only 80 copies of the sixth one.

Let’s assume my numbers are correct. The first one would have made her around $9,000 in royalties, ignoring taxes. The sixth one? $280.

Yikes. Abysmal.

Surprisingly, Vera Winters has kept writing the same AI slop, but she started charging even more for it, from $4.99 for her Starlight Sanctum up to $5.99 for her Shadowbound series. We can assume that this is because she is frantically attempting to make up for the drop in sales.

But the same thing has happened yet again: over 200 reviews for the first book, almost nothing for the next ones as people realize that they have been scammed.

If she wants to keep the grift going, she’d probably be better off doing one-off books so everyone is exposed to her derivative crap anew each time.

Step outside of your tech bubble and you’ll see that most people hate AI. They’re sick of it. If you search “AI” on Bluesky, you see pretty much nothing but haters, including this hilarious tweet:

And even AI companies themselves realize that if people knew how AI worked, they wouldn’t like it anymore.

As soon as tech companies started forcing AI on everyone, people stopped liking it. Post AI images and people will roast you, picking them apart. Post AI writing and people will laugh at you.

And they certainly won’t pay for something they could easily generate themselves with a few clicks.

I’m not worried about AI writers surpassing me. They won’t.

A lot of pro-AI people say that writers and artists who complain about AI are just worried about becoming irrelevant.

We’re not. Every single time AI has been rolled out, companies have lost money because, as previously mentioned, the average consumer doesn’t like being forcefed some generative garbage.

The backlash is already here. CNET was forced to stop using AI-generated articles after controversy. An academic journal had to retract an article that used a hilariously bad AI-generated image, and recent research has cast aspersions on the entire scientific community after it was found that many journal articles were submitted with clear marks of using ChatGPT.

In fact, most companies are losing up to 6% of their annual revenue on AI rollouts. OpenAI is hemorraging money, and the recent rollout of Chinese competitor DeepSeek is going to make that even worse.

You really think ChatGPT is going to be free forever? It won’t be. Soon enough, they’re going to paywall it in hopes of desperately recouping even a fraction of their losses. Or you’ll get a handful of freebie responses and then have to pay for credits.

Are you willing to spend real money to do your work? Do you really think, after what I showed you before, that you’ll receive a return on investment? Nope. You won’t.

As companies like OpenAI tighten the noose in hopes of paying their creditors, the average AI “writer” is going to realize that they, too, won’t make anything off their work. They’ll jump ship and find a new grift because their hearts weren’t in it anyway.

Us authors will remain, crafting work that people care about. If you want to join us, there’s plenty of time to advance your skills so that your writing has true heart.