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Failed Writer's Journey: Imitative AI Will Make You A Worse Writer [1]
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Date: 2025-06-20
You really shouldn’t be using imitative AI if you are a writer that has yet to achieve success — defined either as getting a publishing contract or making more than occasional coffee money with you self-published works. Imitative AI, at this stage of your journey, can only hurt your ability to learn to be a good writer.
Okay, I can hear people saying, you are a failed writer — you admit it right on the door. What the hell do you know about anything related to being a success? Fair cop. I am a failed writer, by the definition above. I am, obviously, not in a position to tell people how to succeed at writing. But I do know how imitative AI works, and I do know what science says about its use. And the science backs up the common sense: using imitative AI, especially when you are learning a skill, makes you dumber.
The most recent study tracked the brain activity of people who used ChatGPT to write an essay. It found that people who used ChatGPT, as compared to those that did not, had the lowest brain engagement and “consistently underperformed at neural, linguistic, and behavioral levels.” Oh, and the more they used ChatGPT, the more they were likely to just give up on writing and copy and paste. In other words, they did not become more successful essay writers, and they did not learn the skill.
This, of course, makes perfect sense. If your child copied answers to mathematical word problems from an answer key, there is no way you would believe that your kid had learned how to reason about mathematical problems. You’d call them a cheater and take away their iPad? iPhone? Roblox? I dunno, man, it’s been a while since my kids were that young. Regardless, you’d know them for the cheaters they are — and if you gave a damn about your kid, you’d be worried that they weren’t learning.
And that is what all writers, but especially new and unsuccessful writers, should be doing all the time — learning. You may be able to get some basic, mid-level text out of an imitative AI system. But that is pretty much all you will be able to do. The systems are just an average of what they have learned on, so it cannot never produce anything truly unique, truly good. You won’t ever learn to tell the stories you want to tell if all you do it use a word calculator to write them for you. That’s just common sense — and science.
Weekly Word Count
Five pages.
The table read went better than I thought it would. They found a lot of things they liked, but pretty much all agreed that the third act in particular falls apart. So, I am doing a page one rewrite (well, kinda. I suspect some material will survive) and will see what happens.
Have a great weekend, everyone.
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