My Science Fiction is Human-Written

I am a fan of what AI can do to help us get work done—even creative work. But when it comes to my work as a fiction author, I refuse to put out AI-written copy with my name on it.

When people are kind enough to subscribe to my email updates, I’m not comfortable sending them posts spit out by a bot. I don’t think that’s what people want.

LLMs have come a long way, but they still write with a formula that isn’t mine. When I notice an AI app was used to write a post, I’m less interested. That’s the last thing I want for my readers.

I want the read to be a somewhat intimate experience. I don’t want to make this weird, but truly, that’s one of the unique aspects of reading: you’re stepping into another person’s head.

In On Writing, Stephen King called it telepathy across space and time. I can buy that. Every time I listen to his audiobook, it feels doubly-so because he is the narrator reading his words. “We’re close,” he says as Uncle Stevie reads me to sleep.

I want that for my readers—not necessarily to read them to sleep—again, not trying to make this weird. But I want the story to feel like it’s unfolding for us at the same time. What I’m feeling, they feel. My goal is for my words to be crystal-clear, simple conduits for the connection between our brains.

Image created with Gemini (Nano Banana) by Jonathan Fashbaugh

Artificial Intelligence adds all sorts of extras that hijack the reader-to-author connection. Even if we assume that proper use of AI includes building a custom GPT with author-attached character backstory, a made-from-scratch outline, world building notes, and a style guide for tone and word choice, I don’t believe that the bot would create a piece that simply builds the connective-tissue. If I did that, and maybe I’ll try it someday, I still don’t think I could put my name on it without adding the bot as the other author.

My promise to you is that, if you buy a work of fiction with my name on it, you’ll have a direct line to the creative part of my brain and my brain only.

A few disclaimers:

1. As I said in the beginning of this post, I think AI can help with creative work at other stages of the process. An LLM can help with brainstorming, fact checking, editing, and much more. When I am putting words down on “paper,” it will be my fingers hitting the keys of a keyboard sending words through that fuzzy part of my creative consciousness, downstream in the timeline to your eyes and ears.
   

2. I use various AI programs for image generation. Many times, they’re laughably bad, but they are improving at an amazing rate. For now, my plan is to always cite the AI I used while generating an image to identify it as the medium of creation. As an author, I see using AI for images as a cost-effective way to support content, but I’ll continue to use cover designers for the final cover of my books—at least for the foreseeable future.
   

3. You may have read in my bio that I am also a business owner. I work in marketing as well as fiction, and when I write for my marketing work, I lean more heavily on AI. I pour a bunch of my thoughts into the app and have it use its knowledge of my writing style, my expertise, its knowledge of my business and industry, and have it put together a first draft of an article. It's always trash. Fiction or not, now one wants to read trash. I never publish that draft. I always end up rewriting it and there’s very little of that first draft that makes it through to the finished piece. And if I’m writing for a magazine that explicitly asks for content that is written by a human, I skip the AI draft altogether.
   

   Why am I comfortable using AI more in non-fiction? Because I’m sharing facts rather than fantasy. If I can share the knowledge I have more efficiently by leveraging an AI tool, I don’t think my non-fiction readers care whether or not an AI tool was used as long as the content is valuable, and I’m not claiming content or ideas written by someone else as my own—something I would never do.

   
   

   I put my style into the pieces that I write for my marketing website or dental industry magazines, but I don’t think that style carries as much value as the concepts in the content.

   
   

   When it comes to writing sci-fi and other speculative fiction, my fantasies and style are what people are coming for—more so than in non-fiction anyway. If I use the fantasies of a robot, no matter how cool they might be, they’re not truly mine.

   
   

4. I can see a future where my dedication to human-written fiction may change. AI tools may get so good at knowing me, it may become a lossless conduit for sharing my stories with you. When that time comes, I’ll update this promise to share what I think has changed. I’m sure, with just a little digging, we could find some missives written by classic authors who felt very strongly that real writing should be done with a pen or pencil on paper (well, Natalie Goldberg’s Writing Down The Bones comes to mind), and that the rat-tat-tat of a typewriter broke the connection between writer and reader.

As our world and AI copywriting continues to evolve, perhaps we’ll come to love AI-enhanced copywriting as a new art form. Probably some people already do. I simply want to declare that, for now, all the fiction that I publish won’t be written by AI, and that I will always be transparent about how I use AI in my process.