How many times have you started a text, email, or a letter and a message pops up from AI wanting to help you? Bugs me to no end. I’m a writer. I don’t need AI’s help. Or do I?

If I’m honest, I do sometimes. I definitely need it for spellcheck. Then there are times when what I’ve written isn’t quite right, and if I click on the “corrections” AI wants to make, the sentence sounds better. However, if I worry the sentence around in my head, I will come to the same place AI wants to take me…except AI is a lot quicker. What’s wrong with that?

Nothing…Maybe…if you do it occasionally, but that’s like eating only one M&M. Using AI can become addictive. It’s so easy to rely on AI that we often don’t want to put in the hard work of getting it right on our own. Then again, what happens when we don’t use our muscles? They atrophy, that’s what, and the brain is a muscle. If you don’t use it, as the cliche goes, you’ll lose it. I really worry about the children growing up now. Public school students already can’t read or write cursive. At some point, we are going to have people who can’t read the Constitution.

How about the moral implications? Is there anything wrong with writers inputting their story concepts and characters into programs like ChatGPT, Sudowrite, and NovelAI, and others and having it spit out a book? Where do we draw the line?

Personally, I view AI as a tool writers can use much like the computer. Sort of. I’ve used it when searching for a title for the project I’m working on. I’ve created character images to put in the character section of my writing program, and I’ve used it to find names for those characters. And I definitely use it for spellcheck, but I would never use it to create a story. One reason is that the story would be flat. AI cannot create an emotionally rounded character because AI has no soul. It can’t write emotions it will never feel.

Writers must decide how much AI they want to use because like the title says, it isn’t going away. So how do you feel about AI? Is it a gift to writers or something we need to run away from? Or does it fall somewhere in between?