by Lauren Elise Daniels
Over the past eighteen months, an increasing number of people using generative AI have requested my editing services to support their attempts at creative writing. By gen AI, I’m referring to programs that siphon the published work of human beings, not supportive AI like spell-check or the editor function of Microsoft Word. Across these submissions, patterns are revealing how AI is manipulating us, rather than the other way around, like a hammer that keeps coming down upon our fingers. What I’m finding is insidious and well beyond the marketing tone, arguments about em dashes, or annoying buzzwords.
For some background, I’ve edited over 150 novels and nonfiction works as well as innumerable short stories, personal essays, and poems since 2000, with fifteen years as an in-house editor, then freelancer. Also, as a published writer since 1987, I navigate both sides of the editing process and am acutely aware of the intimacy of this arrangement. For me, it’s an honor to support creative visions, to ask the right questions, and nudge writers along as they fortify their work. I’ve come to believe that the creative process is a lifelong attempt to tell the truth, but gen AI is demolishing the process from within.
Shades of entitlement, willful ignorance, and scope creep have colored my interactions with those relying on gen AI in the compilation of their manuscripts, and it’s grown clearer just how this tool damages those who wield it. Like everyone else, I initially focused on the theft of gen AI as stealing from other creatives and on the environmental impact, but there’s more.
Gen AI not only scrapes the work of those who sacrifice energy, income, even their relationships to make their work sharp enough to go public, but also disables users’ discernment and robs them of the capacity to hone their skills. The use of gen AI concretizes encroachment and entitlement. I believe it traps users in theft, repetitive output, and a failure to go inward to refine their own capability. Creative breakthroughs are lost and users are unaware of what they’re losing.
In Jon Winokur’s Writers on Writing, British novelist and Nobel Prize winner Doris Lessing offered, “Always the same advice: learn to trust your own judgment, learn inner independence, learn to trust that time will sort the good from the bad—including your own bad” (Running Press Book Publishers, 1986). Lessing emphasizes that writerly wisdom evolves from the practice itself. There’s no shortcut. Writers toil. We write and delete and rewrite. We get harsh feedback that makes us howl privately but we still look for the truth in the criticism and seek out where readers stumbled. We read, study, redefine our approaches, and our creations are born. Our voices solidify and we strive to experiment and reach even further next time. We can’t skip any of this, but skipping is exactly what gen AI encourages us to do.
After seeing various samples that compilers are attempting to pass off as their work, I now understand that for those considering gen AI “as a crutch,” as one user called it, it stunts the development of artistic integrity and the very discernment we need to grasp quality—two of our most valuable assets as creatives.
Alexa—a pseudonym—was the first who approached me via email seeking mentoring for a dark suspense thriller. Before I knew her material used gen AI, I asked for the first fifty pages and a synopsis. I also asked her to complete my questionnaire regarding her writing experience and goals.
When I received Alexa’s reply, I opened the manuscript first to approach the work without any bias from her background. From page one, however, I found a slurry of tone-deaf clichés, mixed metaphors, and painfully circular content. Wooden caricatures streamed in and out of paragraphs and spoke in repetitive idioms without purpose, theme, or a central conflict. The synopsis was worse. Instead of a theme-driven plot outline providing the key spoilers, a climax, and resolution, it was a highly-populated marketing blurb jammed with no discernible center of gravity.
When asked, Alexa disclosed her use of gen AI and I felt robbed of my time. I declined the mentorship, citing gen AI as plagiarism, and recommended she invest in workshops with professionals I trust. I advised her to leave the gen AI behind and nurture her voice by writing her own stories.
Alexa’s reply was the first of what became a typical response from users of gen AI content: defensive, ignorant, and entitled.
First, she defended gen AI and its inevitability, an angle that reads like coercion. I wondered how she expected to elicit my cooperation from this approach. Alexa then expressed confusion regarding my brief critique of the sample. The blown-out prose, immense cast of caricatures, and lack of a plot or theme were all invisible to her. I gave hints about cohesion and further resources, but I resisted the urge to spell out my observations because being able to recognize what makes good writing is the lens she needed to earn through the practice itself.
Lastly, an extensive list of questions tapping my expertise began to ping my inbox. Her sense of entitlement glowed through several ensuing emails seeking more clarification and more resources, all at no investment on her behalf. I admit, I was fascinated by her perspective, as she was the first of many who would come knocking, and I responded in a state of wonder. She made it increasingly clear, however, that she undervalued this discipline and was accustomed to getting what she wanted for free. Her reasoning was that she worked full time and didn’t have the money to spend on the study of suspense thrillers, even though she wanted to write and sell one for profit. Alexa’s last email went unanswered.
During this exchange, I took a second look at Alexa’s materials and found something that would eerily reappear in future exchanges with other gen AI users. Culturally insensitive references were masked as inclusion but were simply exploitative. Ethnicities were stereotyped and served as window dressing. They conveyed no understanding of background or history and held little bearing on the plot. Mental health and gender representations were archaic and offensive. Lastly, there were First Nations references cherry-picked for atmosphere.
It’s helpful to mention that I’ve worked through the fluctuations of representation in publishing over the last quarter-century, where the industry has embraced an informed shift away from reductionist portrayals. Professionals are also more sensitive regarding content that does not belong to or is not given to them. We’re also seeing creatives with deep cultural insight and lived experience creating communities of artists who speak for themselves.
For four radiant examples of where human writers are heading, see Bram Stoker Award®-winner Silk & Sinew: A Collection of Folk Horror from the Asian Diaspora, edited by Kristy Park Kulski (Bad Hand Books, 2025); This Way Lies Madness, edited by Lee Murray and Dave Jeffery (Flame Tree Press, 2025); Never Whistle at Night: An Indigenous Dark Fiction Anthology, edited by Shane Hawk & Theodore C. Van Alst Jr. (Random House, 2023); and Other Terrors: An Inclusive Anthology, edited by Vince A. Liaguno & Rena Mason (William Morrow & Co., 2022).
Contemporary readers expect stories to be stronger and driven by accurate portrayals from qualified sources. Rather than skimming characters’ physical or psychological features, writers have been delivering more multidimensional cast members who read as reflections of our humanity. If writers borrow from another culture, it’s with sensitivity and endorsement. But I’m seeing gen AI inviting a return to a colonizer mindset of theft without recourse.
Ultimately, I’m unsure how much Alexa understood, but I quickly recognized the patterns of others vaulting over the process that creates powerful writers. Alexa bypassed moments like savoring and deconstructing another writer’s exquisite paragraphs to identify the underlying techniques. She omitted the awkward attempts of trying to emulate those effects in her own work. She missed illuminating her first draft of exposition into lively beats of dramatic action that roll across a reader’s mind and expand into the spine of a character arc. She never tried to replicate what she loved most about a good suspense thriller until her narrative grew fluid and seamless.
As gen AI decreases the value placed on the work of others, it can be easy to lose sight of the value of our own work; so easy, we don’t even notice, especially if it’s packaged just right. Over time, I began to receive summaries (as part of a submission package for editing) from writers who had entered their original, unedited work into a gen AI program and received glowing responses in return. The summaries dripped with canned praise and the writer was thrilled with the impression that The New York Times Book Review was simply waiting to receive their genius.
Unwittingly, however, these writers had just fed their material into the machine, so it was everyone’s now. And the assessment of the writing was fawning and nowhere near accurate. Again, gen AI was encouraging people to skip over the actual work and just pop the champagne already.
Through the uniquely human process of distilling first-hand experiences, knowledge, and emotional textures into our creations, our writing skills are forged by our attempts to use them purposely. It’s a messy process but skillful writing is born from making messes and straightening them out.
When we pull from the threads of others’ work and call it our own, we feed the quiet little Dunning-Kruger effect that lurks within all of us. Over time, I’ve come to believe that none of us is immune, no matter how established, to the temptation to overestimate our skills and the quality of our work; we struggle with the determination to keep refining our attempts toward accuracy and to keep straining to tell the truth. This is the surrender of the writer’s greatest tool.
While supportive AI can check our grammar—and AI is welcome to excel under strict control in areas like data analysis, medical imaging diagnostics, and risk assessments—we will only find human stories through reading, writing, rewriting, and connecting with our communities.
AI is only going to grow more cunning in its siphoning and mimicry, but it does not belong in the writer’s chair or there will be no room for us. It can check our punctuation, but it cannot tell us who we are. It can hint that we need a comma, but it cannot craft memories and sensations into fresh ways of perceiving the human condition. It cannot innovate. The only way we can craft something that speaks through and beyond us is to do it ourselves.
