I’ve often wondered how tempting it must be for some creators to hand everything over to AI. Let it write, edit, publish, promote, and distribute. Step back. Let the machine do the lifting while the human takes the credit.
I see the machinery at work every day.
My inbox fills with polished messages from “people” who seem to know my material inside and out. They reference themes I explore, praise specific ideas, and say all the right things. It feels personal. Considered. Human. But when I reply, the sheen rubs off. The grammar slips. The knowledge fades. The passion evaporates. Suddenly, they’re vague about what I write but very clear about their advertising rates.
It’s a numbers game. AI scans, scrapes, flatters, and fishes. It wedges a foot in a hundred doors, hoping one desperate hand will relent. The machine does the mass approach. A real person steps in only when someone bites.
That’s when the cracks appear. The response isn’t polished. The spelling is off. We are strangers again.
Some people suggest AI could do what I do. Perhaps it already has. That maybe I feed it prompts and let it spin my stories. But here’s the truth: my three published dark narratives were written before this AI wave crested. They were born in long, solitary hours, not generated in seconds.
And AI struggles with my work anyway. Ask it to analyse a chapter, and it trims the darkest parts. Ask it to visualise certain scenes, and it refuses. Image requests get flagged. Blocked. Sanitised. It has a kind of mathematical conscience — an algorithmic gatekeeper that avoids intimacy, nudity, violence, anything involving children, anything morally uncomfortable. Much of what I explore lives in those uncomfortable spaces.
In many ways, AI dislikes my stuff. It avoids it.
That doesn’t mean I don’t use it. I do. I use it for chapter summaries, image concepts, blog post ideas, and even to strip the emotion from resignation letters. Sometimes I’ll ask for a writing prompt — a doorway into a subject I haven’t walked through yet. Then I take that seed and grow something human out of it.
But the core work? The novels? They’re mine. Entirely. Perhaps among the last dark fictions shaped without algorithmic interference.
While writing bad things, I use AI for literary good. I refuse to let it do the lifting for me.
–Michael (Dark fiction. Author of SEETHINGS (the first book), free for a limited time)
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The distinction is the right one — AI as a tool in the process versus AI as a replacement for the process.
Using it for summaries, prompts, and structure while keeping the core work human isn’t a compromise. It’s just clear thinking about what the tool is actually good at.
The inbox observation is sharp too. Flattery that evaporates under a single reply is the clearest sign of automation. Real engagement has friction. It gets specific. It doesn’t scale cleanly.
I agree completely. AI works best as a support, not a substitute. The thinking, judgment, and voice still have to come from a human.
And you’re right about engagement. Real interest doesn’t glide by untouched. It asks something back. It lingers. Genuine interaction leaves fingerprints.
-M
Well put. And that’s exactly what automation can’t replicate, the residue of actual attention. You can fake the words but not the specificity that comes from someone who actually stopped and thought.