My First Ideas Aren’t My Best—And AI Only Makes Them Worse

Recently, I found myself in a circle of writers in New York City, all well-known and successful. They were sharing their love of writing, the process, the craft—the joy of creation—and how they were born to do this and without writing their souls would starve from malnutrition. I nodded (of course I nodded).

(How I Turned My Character Into My Best Marketing Tool.)

I'm going to come clean. For me, writing is a grind and I’m pretty sure my soul wouldn’t starve without it. I’ve always been the kind of person that spends far too many daylight hours inventing ways around doing hard things. And writing is so damned hard.

I write fiction—thrillers to be exact. I’ve written two. I wasn’t always thrilling to be around as I wrote them (apologies again to my wife and dog). The literary vehicle carrying me to ‘The End’ was a jalopy. It was a year-long journey traversing unknown roads at midnight without headlights to guide me. I took a lot of frustrating detours, hit a lot of trees, and got my wheels buried in muddy fields. Those stories took a long time to find their way home.

I’d been looking forward to jumping into my third book. I figured, by now, I knew what I was doing—how could I not have learned something from my previous mistakes? I would discover my central theme early. I’d write a clean first draft instead of the meandering mess I usually produced.

How's it going? Not great.

It was then I heard the siren song of AI.

I waded in cautiously. If you haven’t dipped a toe in yet, let me tell you, it’s remarkably simple to master. It impressed me immediately. It wasn’t long before I used it as an assistant to help me build my website. It was a phenomenal researcher. And it’s a ‘pretty good’ collaborator for brainstorming as long as you understand the suggestions it gives will never be entirely original. After all, the technology is based on pattern recognition—it’s designed to be derivative. When I get the time, I’m going to let it tutor me in Italian. The more I interacted with AI the more I could see the possibilities—the promise of making my life more efficient.

But could it write? Should it write? I can hear your teeth grinding from here. I know. Just toying with the idea made me feel a little guilty. Of course, I shouldn’t let it write. I’m the writer. That’s my job.

But, on the other hand, it’s just a tool, right? The ideas I give it are my ideas, coming from my unique understanding of the world. And there were already plenty of people on YouTube proudly letting AI write books for them. If it helped me write faster, my publisher would be pleased. My readers would be happy. And my bank account would be overjoyed.

Mine was a slow, persistent creep toward the dark side. But, in spite of all the rationalizations, it still felt like crossing a line. As my wife has come to make terms with, there’s a rebellious, curious 13-year-old living inside my 60-year-old skin. So as I often do, I crossed the line.

I let ChatGPT take the writing wheel. Just a test drive.

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Here’s how it worked. I gave it a sample of my writing and asked it to mimic my style. Then I gave it some backstory about my characters. I told it what needed to happen in the scene. The score was in my head. I directed while AI played the notes it created on the fly. It wrote paragraphs and pages at a blistering pace. No writer’s block. No trepidation. No second thoughts. In the time it took me to write a single paragraph, we had collaborated on several chapters. And talk about a delightful partner!

There was a small problem with the writing. It’s possible that the fault was in the author it was mimicking but my test drive took me to the literary equivalent of an over-asphalted strip mall on the generic side of town. But that was a small, ‘first draft’ kind of problem. I could clean up the text another day. It was fun. I left my office feeling, for the first time, prolific. Maybe AI could be the collaboration partner I needed. As long as I didn’t tell anyone.

That night, tucked in bed and staring into the darkness, something hit me. A realization. I wasn't thinking of my story. That's unusual for me. I always drift off thinking about what happened at the writing desk and the decisions that await me. That night? Nothing. I had almost no connection to what I'd worked on that day. And make no mistake, I was an active creative partner. Every story idea was my own. Why the disconnect?

Here’s the problem with passing the pen over to artificial intelligence.

Every writer knows where the battle takes place. Literary wars are won and lost at sentence level. That’s where the brutality is—the hand-to-hand combat. It is in that place where my ideas generate and my creativity sparks. It is where my muse will show up…if she shows up.

That day in the writing room there had been no fight. No battle. I was using a joystick to control my story.

Another problem? AI had praised all of my ideas. And, I, so desperate to hear a compliment, momentarily believed that I was brilliant. But here’s the thing. I know better. Life has shown me with great clarity that my first ideas are not my best ideas. And, if I’m being honest, neither are my second, third, or fourth. In my excitement to see words and sentences filling up the page, I lost sight of how my process works. AI had removed me from the depth of my story—the victory that comes from battling at the cursor.

Someone is likely reading this and thinking that I should have used a different LLM (large language model). Some might say that the next generation of AI will run circles around what it can do today. And they are likely right. But it won’t matter.

My value (and your value) isn’t in producing more words per hour—it’s in the specific way our minds work through problems, the unexpected connections we make when we’re building our sentences. When we’re in the flow. And, most importantly, when we’re stuck.

Having AI remove my writing problem…is my biggest problem with AI. Speed will never be our competitive advantage as storytellers.

We're living through a peculiar moment in history. It’s possible that AI is leading us to a post-literate era where readers will be satiated with creamed-corn stories ladled out of huge dystopian silver tanks. But I’m not that pessimistic. I truly believe that the more technology we consume, the more we will yearn for authentically human stories—written by authentic humans. My stories. Your stories.

So what did I learn in this brief test drive? Sorry AI, but I’m not letting you near my sentences. There, I will fight my own battles—writing slowly and inefficiently because writing is hard and, if I’m going to produce my best work, I must always lean into the ‘hard.’

My hope is that the literature of our tomorrows will not exit off a smooth, artificially paved highway but arrive with tree branches in the bumper and mud on the tires and scratches and dents from smacking into all sorts of things in the night.