“I loathe writing, I love having written” said Dorothy Parker. One might imagine she’d be thrilled to live today, when AI can so swiftly take care of the part she loathed. AI tools are everywhere in the creative writing world. They’re fast, slick and increasingly normalised – especially for beginners.
Unfortunately, AI isn’t a writer, or even a decent co-writer – and it robs beginners of the process they need to grow.
What AI can and can’t do
Writing is the product of two things: thinking, and having something to say about the experience of being human. While AI can generate prompts, mimic styles and complete stories, it cannot think, and has no experience of being human.
As a writing tutor, reading AI-generated writing feels like watching someone who is clearly pretending to cry: it looks like the real thing, but stirs nothing. Writing is a courageous act; it’s putting your hand up because you have something to say, something you’ve drawn from lived experience. Writing is the process of wrestling with meaning.
AI can’t do that. Only you can.
Which is why AI-generated content reads well – as in, it would pass a language test – but says little.
As Creative Writing tutor Helen Cox says, “Nobody else in the world will put words together in the distinctive order that you do. That’s authenticity.” Another thing AI cannot do, Helen points out, is get bored. “None of us like to admit it, but we all sometimes add a boring bit into our work without meaning to… ‘kill your darlings’ is a well-worn phrase for a reason. And there’s little chance of us detecting our darlings, let alone brutally massacring them with a wistful smile on our faces, without human intervention.”
The real risk is skipping the craft
Like any skill, writing takes practice, feedback, reworking and reflection. That’s not a process that can be skipped or outsourced, any more than you get can get AI to do your driving lessons for you and expect to pass your test.
But concerns for students who rely on AI to write go far beyond the simple fact of the underwhelming results:
First, output is not the same as learning. Writing is hard because it’s almost ludicrous in what it’s asking of you: to transplant your thoughts, feelings, experiences and imagined worlds onto a page, and all you have to convey any of it is words. While there’s short-term comfort in removing that friction, you also remove the process of discovery. Free-writing is a task many tutors set in class: here’s a prompt, write whatever comes to mind. Time and again students report, “I didn’t know I thought that”. Some of the most astonishing pieces I’ve read from students came out of a free-writing task set in the first lesson, which they then revised and developed into something publishable. We’d hate for you to miss out on that discovery.
Second, when you aren’t generating your own ideas, it follows that you will lose confidence in your ability to do so.
Third, when you outsource your thinking, your own abilities do atrophy. A recent study by MIT showed people who habitually use AI to write “show weaker neural connectivity” than those who rely only on their brains. Which makes sense – if you get someone to go to the gym for you, it would be weird to wonder why you aren’t getting buff.
Fourth, the work AI generates is not yours. In a workshop setting, when someone talks about where they ‘bumped’ as they read your piece – ‘this needs more detail’, ‘I wasn’t sure what you meant here’, ‘I’d like to know more about this character’ – you’re not in a position to communicate what you were going for, and consider how you might get there in your next draft. As Helen says, “Tempting though it may be to let AI do the heavy lifting, you risk one of the most important things we have at our disposal: our individual mode of expression.”
Fifth, AI companies have the audacity to charge you money to help to train models that are being used to legitimise the idea that when it comes to writing, humans are optional. You’re paying to normalise your own obsolescence – and what are they proposing as your replacement? As Creative Writing tutor Jonathan Barnes puts it, a “glassy-eyed ‘mimicry’ of existing writers”. At least Dr Faustus got magical powers in exchange for his soul; people who pay for AI writing tools aren’t even getting good writing.
What human tutors and courses offer
From human tutors and a community of supportive writers, you can get real feedback tailored to your voice and project. You consider and discuss questions such as, ‘What is the effect of this technique?’, ‘What’s missing?’, ‘How might you get this across?’ Writing classes are, according to Jonathan, “an ongoing conversation…human interaction… full of messiness, different opinions, the odd clash and a lot of support.”
Courses with humans also offer deadlines and accountability – nothing slays writer’s block like knowing your piece is being workshopped next week!
If you MUST use AI…
Despite the impression we may have given, I swear we’re not Luddites cursing the machines as we don bonnets and hand-churn butter. While the usefulness of AI has been almost absurdly overrated, there may be a baby in all this murky bathwater. AI can generate prompts, which can help break a block. It can spellcheck. It can even start you off with an idea. All of that is fine. But if you’re using it to think, reflect or revise, that’s a red flag.
Here’s a good test to find the red line between using AI in a way that can support your writing, and using it in a way that robs you of the process you need to grow as a writer: if your AI software suddenly morphed into a person, shouted “I’m a real boy!” and then accused you of plagiarism, would it be right? If it’s written chunks of your piece for you, it would. If all it did was give you a prompt and correct your spelling, it can pipe down.
Growth > Convenience
AI might help you produce words, but it won’t help you create. “Creative” is the part of creative writing that can only come from you. Perhaps Dorothy Parker’s quote updated to the age of AI would read, “I loathe creating, but love having created.” Because creating is a process – and while impatience is natural, the way to get through it is not to outsource it to something that can only, at a glance, give the impression of having created.
Real writers are made through challenge, reflection and support. If you want to become a better writer, trust the process – and trust the people, the tutors and the fellow students, who are here to guide you through it.
Learn to Write at City Lit
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