"You're Not a Real Writer if You Use AI"

Are you a bully if you say this?

This image was created by AI

“If you use AI you are not a real writer.”

I heard this phrase today. And not just today, over the last year or so it has grown stronger and louder in the writing community. But today, I want you to sit with this accusation for a moment, because I think we need to reckon with what it means that we are the ones saying it.

I’m going to be honest: when I see this discourse, it disheartens me. We writers—no matter fiction, non-fiction, commentary, or whatever have you—are teachers of empathy. It is our responsibility as scribes to understand the world, to experience different worldviews, and to carry those truths back to the people who never could have found them on their own. And with empathy there must come compassion. A willingness to understand the other side of the aisle.

The above quote flies in the face of all I have ever understood about our place in this world.

I love writers. I love them for the same reason I believe brought most of you here: because I myself am the kind of person who needs stories to survive. I loved the writing community long before there was a Substack, a TikTok, or a Twitter in which we could fling our purist ideals at one another. What drew me to this community was the belief that regardless of the color of your skin, your socioeconomic background, your gender, or your sexual preference, if you had an idea and wanted to tell a story, you would be welcomed.

Notice I didn’t say could tell a story. My choice of word is intentional. Wanted. A burning desire to tell a story. This, and an idea, was the price of admission into the world that I love.

In the rise of AI, a fear has spread. The curtain has fallen on what we do as writers, and the demystification is unsparing. I too have often overglorified and romanticized the act and the art of being a writer. The divinity of it. The calling of adding to the fabric of civilization.

But I had to realize a hard truth: the great myth of the writer—the hero come to life, the one who slays the blank page and liberates the ideas running wild in their mind–was an overestimation of ourselves. And this mythologizing, I have come to believe, is what blinds us to the reason we all came here in the first place.

To tell stories.

Don’t get me wrong. I understand people’s concerns. I am not so blind, or so idealistic, or even so nonsensical as to pretend otherwise. So let us examine both sides of the argument.

Participation Trophies

You are passionate about that 475-page tome you have been writing about the eight kingdoms and the fae princess who is destined to be with a mate she can’t stand. Despite all their differences they find true love in the face of class divides, unfair beauty standards, oppressive gender roles, or whatever social injustice you have chosen to combat. You should be passionate. You are a freaking badass! But you don’t just want to write a book and leave it in your Google Drive for all eternity. You want the world to see it. You want a return on your investment which is valid, and honestly smart. You’ve worked hard on this–years, countless hours of planning, writing, editing, marketing this masterpiece.

And then here comes the AI writer. Who has written something nowhere near the quality of your work, in a fraction of the time, with a fraction a the mental anguish and sacrifice. They push ‘publish’ and it’s shotgunned to Amazon and anywhere else books are sold. They are getting reviews. They are even making a buck. They are not passionate about their idea or their story. They don’t care about the craft you spent so many years learning and embracing. They make a mockery of this great profession and reap the rewards in spite of it. All they care about is a dollar.

Sacrilege.

Being a writer is hard. It takes grit. Showing up to the blinking cursor as often as one possibly can, in spite of pain, depression, joy, hunger, chaos in life. A writer must bleed on the page through it all. It takes many years to even become halfway decent at this craft. So when you manage to write a decent piece of work, when you manage to rip and tear through the hours, days, months, sometimes years of labor to birth your genius, that means something. As it should. That beaming pride you have for the sentences you strung together is everything.

Millions of people claim they will write the great American novel every year. Hundreds of thousands might even manage their first sentence. Tens of thousands manage their first few chapters. But you are one of the few, the proud, who have actually completed something. You have done the hard thing.

And then here comes the AI writer. Who thumbs their nose at craft, at the hours needed to perfect a skill they will never have to develop. They bypass the labor completely. With a few well-worded prompts and a Word document, they can birth what took you years.

Suddenly, anyone can do this thing we do. Which means we, and this feat of ours, is not so special anymore. Because if anyone can call themselves a writer, then are any of us really writers?

Too Much Noise

Marketing a book is hell. Differentiating yourself is a challenge, to say the least. Week after week you put in the work: pushing your comfort zone, handling rejection,, shooting Instagram reels and TikToks, blasting out Substack newsletters, building your email list, jumping on every podcast and blog you can find…just to make sure your story gets read by a handful of people.

The average writer barely sells more than 250 books over a book’s lifetime. The average income for a self-published author from book sales alone is under a thousand dollars. Despite all your hard work, all your effort, all your mastery of craft, you will likely not even break even on the investment you made bringing this thing into the world. Competition is brutal. There are hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of authors putting books out every year, all around the world. These statistics apply no matter how good your book is, how many followers you have, how many emails you collected.

And now we have the AI writers, pumping work after work into the world, muddying the waters and making it harder than it already was to stand out. And the quality of what they put out is nothing compared to writers like you. So not only must you compete with the real writers of the world, now you have to compete with a flood of prompt-generated noise that distracts your readers, lightens your pockets, and ruins the reputation of your profession.

A Different Take

All of those points are reasonable on the surface. Valid fears and valid gripes about our work being devalued as it is encroached upon by lazy, untalented, grifting, fake writers. No passion, no skill, no desire to build either. Only a dollar and the next prompted pile of garbage.

But I want to look a little closer. Because I think we owe it to ourselves, and I mean that seriously, to look at what we are actually doing when we say these things.

Consider—and I ask you to genuinely consider this, not as a concession but as practice of the empathy we claim to have—that if we rise above the cynical view that all AI authors are operating in bad faith, there might be another way of looking at this.

There are writers out there who use AI for research. To get a clear picture of the world around them when they lack the resources, the time, or the ability to go out and do it themselves. Perhaps they want to understand a community they cannot get close to, or a time they never lived in and cannot find anyone who did. Perhaps the library is not an option for them. Perhaps they don’t even know where to begin, and they use AI to find some direction, to remove the obstacles of time and an overwhelming mental load so they can get to the thing we all came here for: to actually write.

Others use it for feedback. Some don’t have the funds for an editor, and have little access to writing communities that are welcoming, engaging, and genuinely helpful. Or they simply aren’t aware of their options, and this is the most economically feasible thing available to them.

PSST: Looking for genuine feedback from professional, human editors who care about your story? The OBA Story Team is here for you! We’re offering completely free editing sessions on your first 10-15 pages and a guest spot on our podcast, “Let’s Fix Stories!”

And some people use AI because they have higher barriers to overcome. Maybe they have learning disabilities. Maybe English is not their first language. Maybe they are so busy working to put food on the table that they don’t have time for YouTube or craft books or mentors. But they still have the same thing you and I have: a burning desire to tell a story, and an idea that they genuinely just want to exist. Something they can look down at and say,

“That thing that has been gnawing on the inside of my skull is finally out, and I can see it, touch it, read it.”

The same feeling you and I get when we finish our first draft. (I am not so naive as to have it lost on me that our satisfaction largely comes from having actually written it ourselves. But I also know the satisfaction of seeing your idea exist in the real world, and that is worth acknowledging, too.)

The Special Factor

The constant misconception I hear is that if anyone can do it, it isn’t special anymore. The fear being that if AI writers can craft stories without talent or skill or passion, then what is the point of what we do?

But consider this: we were never special. We are not some great global myth, some anomaly that sets us apart from the rest of humanity. Sure, we are part of a legacy of greats who braved the page and earned immortality. But they weren’t special, either.

They just had something so important to say that they had to figure out how to put it in ink.

Writing is a skill. It can be built. And quite frankly, anyone can do it. The fact that we do does not make us the chosen ones, it makes us people with something to say. (And I would argue that these days, that may not be worth as much as we think, because everyone and their mother has an opinion that they demand everyone hear.)

Harshness aside: you are still a writer. I am still a writer. Regardless of how anyone else values my craft, I am still a writer. Whatever AI writers are pumping out into the world, whatever consequences ripple down from that, it has nothing to do with my ability or yours. Their choices take nothing away from your years of practice. It takes nothing away from your story.

An AI writer’s work has zero impact on the quality of ours. So perhaps instead of closing the gate, instead of replacing the great gatekeepers of the Big Five with ourselves, we might consider focusing on our own work, uplifting our own circles, and leaving others to create however they choose.

Because at the end of the day, you will still be a goddamn writer.

The Zero-Sum Game

You are not wrong about the noise. We are living in the age of the noisy void. The world where everyone is an author, a marketer, an entrepreneur, an artist, someone with an opinion that demands to be voiced. Beyond the writing world, in almost any industry that asks us to stand out, with the rise of social media, it has become a challenge to carve out your own place. Specifically in the writing community, with the rise of AI authorship, we have developed what I would say is an irrational fear that we will be replaced. That there are a limited number of seats and someone is about to take ours.

The truth is that writing is not a zero-sum game. For someone else to succeed does not mean you must fail. My unread TBR list alone proves that people still buy and read multiple books. They still read multiple newsletters and blogs, still see multiple films, admire many new paintings, find new favorite songs. There is no finite amount of art that people will consume.

The natural fear is that readers may grow jaded if all the work around them is AI-generated. I think this is a projection of fear and insecurity, and I think the opposite is actually true. The more AI content that floods the world, the more people will seek out real human stories. This is your opportunity. The scarcity mindset that runs rampant in our community is the real problem, not AI writers. There are enough readers. New ones are born every minute. There is room for all of us.

The Mirror

I understand many of your concerns. Our world is run on fear, and it is truly counter-cultural to choose to make your peace and stop carrying these concerns.

When I was a boy, one of the things that drove me to writing was being an outcast. Being bullied. Being told I did not belong. I suspect many of you know that feeling—not only from being a writer, but from long before. From a parent, other kids, a coworker, a world that looked at you and decided, before you opened your mouth, that you had nothing worth saying. Someone tried to bully you into believing a narrative about yourself that was not true.

What I am watching now is us becoming those bullies. Penalizing people for how they choose to create. Assigning them narratives of our own making. Whether you acknowledge it as such is your prerogative, but shutting people out of this community–the community that saved some of us–is beneath us. It makes a mockery of everything we claim to stand for. Those who can understand that, I would argue, are the real writers.

I ask you to consider nuance. I ask you to consider compassion. I ask you to remember why you became a writer in the first place, and what it said about you that you chose to do it. If you are so offended by how others write, extend a hand. Offer an alternative. Or simply go on about your merry way, and be completely oblivious to what anyone else is doing.

If these words or our mission at One Brilliant Arc resonates with you, please consider buying our team a coffee so we can continue helping creatives tell stories that can save the world!

I started One Brilliant Arc because I believe that everyone–everyone–has a story to tell, and I will fight for their right to tell it however they choose. That is my calling as a human, as a thinker, and, most importantly, as a writer. And I am asking you to recognize that it is also yours.

We do not need to tear down others’ legitimacy in order to preserve our own.

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💬 What do you think? Comment below:

• What is your biggest concern as a creative with the rise of AI?

• What are your thoughts on the use of AI to create art?

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