✍️ The Truth About Writing With AI

Why ignoring AI is a luxury writers can’t afford — and how to use it without losing your soul.

Let’s talk about the thing everyone is pretending not to talk about.

Last weekend I was at dinner at a great Indian food spot in the Mission here in SF with a friend of mine who is a writer in Hollywood. We went to USC together and have both seen the industry from the inside. When the conversation inevitably turned to AI, I asked him point-blank what he thought about it.

His answer surprised me.

He said, “Everyone’s using it.”

Not just the studio execs trying to replace writers entirely (though that’s part of the fear, and the fight). But the writers themselves — the ones who want to keep getting hired. Quietly, strategically, every week.

And I realized: I’d been making the same mistake a lot of you have. Assuming that there was some neat divide — the good “real” writers on one side, and the sellouts using AI on the other.

It’s not that simple.

Because here’s the truth no one likes to say out loud: AI is here to stay. (Per Forbes, the generative-AI market exploded from $191 million in 2022 to $25.6 billion in 2024.)

It’s a tool — like a chainsaw. Brilliant for pruning dead branches, but not so great in the wrong hands. But the technology itself? It isn’t going away. Ignore a chainsaw long enough and it becomes somebody else’s lumber empire.

And if you’re a professional writer — or want to be — you can’t afford to bury your head in the sand, even if that feels safer right now. (Per Siege Media, 90% of content marketers plan to use AI in their work.)

I know this is a heated topic. It should be. Copyright law is a mess right now. Courts are making rulings that will have enormous consequences. There are real questions about fairness, training data, creative theft, etc.

(One recent court ruling called AI training “fair use,” comparing it to a teacher using excerpts from classic books to teach students. That doesn’t make it ethical — it just means they can do it legally for now.)

Am I saying I think Big Tech deserves our trust? No.

But I’m saying this: we need to have an honest conversation about how writers are actually using AI — and what that means for you.

Because whether or not you want to use it, you should know how it’s being used. You should know its limits. You should know what it can’t do — and why AI won’t replace real writers, no matter how loudly the suits promise it will.

Most of all, you deserve a clear-eyed look at how AI might fit into your own writing process.

I’m not going to pretend I don’t use it. I used it to help draft this very email.

Why? Because my mission here isn’t to keep secrets from you.

My mission is to help you make writing your job.

And I would be doing you a disservice if I told you to stay pure, stay ignorant, and get blindsided when your clients, your competitors, and your colleagues start using these tools to work faster, think deeper, or brainstorm better.

If you want to unsubscribe because you hate the very idea of AI, that’s your call. I won’t sugarcoat it.

But if you’re willing to read on, I’m going to break down:

• How AI tools can actually help you as a writer right now

• What AI can’t do (and likely never will)

• Why it’s not coming for your voice (and why it will never replace writers)

• And how to use it without losing your soul

Because you deserve the truth.

And I think you can handle it.

How AI Can Help Your Writing

There’s a quote I love from Paul Graham — co-founder of Y Combinator, tech-world demigod, and about the last person you’d expect to be sentimental about the arts:

“…what people call good writing is actually good thinking…”

-Paul Graham

That’s it. That’s the whole trick.

Good writers aren’t just good typists. We’re good thinkers. We know how to see clearly, structure ideas, and communicate so someone else’s brain lights up the way ours does.

Typing is just delivery. Thinking is the craft.

So here’s my question: what if AI could handle the typing while you focus on the thinking?

That’s how I use it. That’s how I want you to think about it.

Back when I was starting as an assistant in Hollywood, I was basically an extension of my boss’s brain. I did their research. I drafted their pitches. I spitballed ideas. I wrote in their voice, so they sounded smarter in meetings and on the page.

That’s how the industry works. Assistants are often ghostwriters in training. It’s not shady — it’s apprenticeship. It’s how you learn the craft while doing the grunt work for someone else.

AI, in my view, is just an over-eager twenty-something assistant who never sleeps and needs constant supervision.

It’s imperfect. It makes mistakes. But it can do a lot of the grunt work for you — even if you can’t personally afford to hire a real assistant to help you.

Here’s a practical example. ChatGPT has a dictation tool. I’ll literally talk out loud about what I want to write. It’ll transcribe it. Then I can say, “Clean that up. Make it sound like me.”

It’s like those old movies where the boss dictates a letter while their secretary types at 100 words per minute.

Except this assistant can also be trained on your past writing. It starts to get your voice. It can help you move from raw ideas to clean first drafts fast.

If you produce a lot of content — newsletters, blog posts, essays — this is a game-changer. You can talk out your ideas, let AI do the typing, and then focus on editing.

Some people hear this and feel uneasy — or even a little guilty.

“Isn’t that cheating?”

Only if Grammarly, spellcheck, and caffeine count as performance-enhancing drugs. But in all seriousness, let me remind you: AI can’t do anything without you.

It’s not magic. It’s a mirror.

In fact, there’s a great case study from the programming world. You might think coding — all rules and logic — would be easy for AI to replace. But when they let an AI agent run a project without any human guidance, it broke down completely within a few hours. It couldn’t make the right judgment calls.

AI needs humans.

Same with writing. If you just tell it, “write me a newsletter,” it’ll spit out lifeless garbage.

But if you spend 5-10 minutes telling it exactly what you want to say, giving it your thinking, your perspective, your intention — you can have a decent first draft in no time.

It’s faster. It’s cheaper. But it still needs you.

And yes, you’ll still need to edit. It’s not going to magically replace the creative part of your brain.

Other Ways AI Can Help Writers Work Smarter

It’s not just drafting. AI is also a beast at organizing.

Ever stare at a 4-hour client interview or massive transcript you need to turn into something coherent? AI can summarize it. Pull out key themes.

As Forbes notes in this article, creative teams that let AI take over the “manual workflows” — transcription, tagging, first-pass layouts — see burnout drop because they get their hours (and headspace) back for actual ideation.

Earlier in my memoir ghostwriting career, I’d be buried under thousands of pages of court documents, emails, interview transcripts for certain book projects that were research-heavy. I’d waste hours hunting for one quote or verifying one date.

Today, AI can ingest all of that and help you say: “Show me every time this person mentioned X and list the documents that do.” Or “Pull every date that matches Y and cite those mentions.”

Last year in Kyoto, Japan I met with a fellow ghostwriter who was using Claude extensively for turning raw transcripts into first drafts of chapters, which helped him streamline his workflow immensely and save time so he could focus on the artistry of his process. I’ve since met other ghostwriters and freelancers who shared similar sentiments with me.

AI is still imperfect. It can hallucinate, invent details. Which means you still have to check its work. But it’s like having a tireless, well-meaning research assistant who can help you in seconds instead of hours.

My Favorite AI Tools (and How I Use Them)

Here’s how I break down what different tools are good for:

• ChatGPT 4o — My eager writing assistant. Great for writing tasks. It can mirror my voice well if I train it.

• ChatGPT o3 — Better for logic puzzles and deep research. It once found me a handwritten Charles Dickens letter in the Internet Archive when I needed an example of serialized fiction payment structures.

• Gemini — My no-BS document researcher. Great at handling big text dumps without getting lost or hallucinating too much.

Each has its quirks. None is perfect. All of them are faster than doing it all yourself.

If you’re curious and want more details on how to use these tools, subscribe as I’ll be sharing more about these different models and how to save you time in your process:

What AI Can’t Do (and Likely Never Will)

Let’s zoom out.

AI has no human spirit. GPT-4 can’t taste heartbreak or smell grandma’s cookies — and those two ingredients still power every novel worth reading.

When I was studying screenwriting at USC, one of my instructors called this your emotional landscape — your unique filter on the world, built from your childhood, your trauma, your tastes, your fears, your dreams.

Ten different writers given the same prompt will write ten different novels. Because they have ten different emotional landscapes.

AI doesn’t have one. It can’t draw on a lifetime of your memories, your insights, your values.

It doesn’t feel anything. It can imitate style. But it can’t care.

That’s why it produces generic nonsense if you don’t guide it.

Your job as a writer isn’t to out-type a machine. It’s to think better. To see better. To have a point of view.

Great writing isn’t typing fast.

It’s perspective.

It’s taste.

It’s choosing what matters and what doesn’t.

And that’s something no AI can replace.

Not unless we get to the point where AI has actual emotions and subjective experience. And if that happens, let’s be honest — we’ll all have bigger problems than figuring out who gets to write the next great American novel.

That’s the Skynet scenario. If we get there, I’ll pivot this Substack to ‘Canned-Goods Stockpiling 101.’

So no. AI won’t replace you as a writer.

It will replace your excuses for not writing.

How to Use AI Without Losing Your Soul

When AI writing tools first came out, I reviewed one that promised to “write your novel for you.”

I roasted it.

It was hilariously bad — like letting an alien who skimmed Wikipedia attempt to write Moby Dick 2: Electric Boogaloo.

And here’s the truth, as my partner Kyle likes to say: AI right now is the worst it will ever be.

It’s only going to get better from here.

That’s exciting. It’s also terrifying.

I get why a lot of you are uneasy. When AI really started gaining traction, I was doing a lot of short-form copywriting and memoir ghostwriting. Watching AI get better forced me to move away from lower-level copywriting work.

And that’s not necessarily a bad thing.

Because good copywriting isn’t just typing slogans. It’s psychology. Salesmanship. Great thinking.

AI won’t replace good copywriters. But smart copywriters will absolutely use it — to brainstorm ten alternate headlines in thirty seconds, to A/B test variations faster, to push their creativity further without wasting hours.

I do this myself. I’ve used AI to write sales copy in my own voice. Sometimes it even floors me how well it nails my tone and keeps it concise.

So the real question isn’t “Will AI replace writers?”

It’s “How can you use AI to become a better one?”

My Own Resistance (and Why I Changed My Mind)

Look, I was skeptical too.

When this stuff first launched, I rolled my eyes. “I’m better than this. I don’t need it.”

But I kept an open mind. I watched my partner Kyle mess around with it for his own workflow and save hours. I got curious.

He showed me.

I learned.

Now? I use AI for everything from drafting ideas to cleaning up text to organizing research.

And I can’t imagine going back in the same way I can’t imagine not having Grammarly. Or Spellcheck. Or having to flip through an encyclopedia when I can just Google something in two seconds.

Progress Isn’t the Enemy

Remember when your math teacher said you had to learn long division because you wouldn’t “always have a calculator in your pocket”?

How’d that work out?

Or when every teacher insisted you had to master cursive to be a functioning adult?

Exactly.

When the Remington typewriter hit offices in the 1870s, critics called it “the end of penmanship.” Twenty years later nobody wrote business letters by hand — but great novelists were still very much employed.

Technology moves forward. Tools get better. The craft changes.

That doesn’t make you less of a writer.

It makes you a smarter one.

Writers Are More Than Typists

This is the real shift:

You’re not just a typist.

You’re a thinker. A strategist. A philosopher.

Your medium is words. But your art is perspective.

Being a writer in 2025 means learning to direct your tools — not being replaced by them.

Think of Pixar when CGI killed hand-drawn animation jobs. That was an existential crisis for traditional animators. (Fun fact: nearly half of Pixar’s current storyboard team learned digital tools after they were hired, not in art school. Creative professionals are always learning “on the job” when theory fails them.)

Despite all these evolutions in technology, the best artists didn’t vanish. They adapted. They learned new tools. They became even more powerful storytellers.

You can too.

Why Writers Who Learn to Use AI Will Win

Let me be blunt: writers who figure out how to work with AI will be more successful than writers who refuse to touch it.

Not because AI makes you better at thinking.

But because it removes busywork. Speeds up ideation. Organizes chaos. Gives you more time to focus on what actually matters:

Your voice. Your perspective. Your thinking.

It’s not mandatory. You can still write without it.

But why would you want to work twice as hard for the same result?

This Isn’t About Selling Out. It’s About Owning Your Future.

Change is scary.

Especially for writers — an industry that’s spent centuries underpaid, overworked, and exploited by gatekeepers.

But the same tech that threatens to commoditize writing can also liberate you.

You don’t need permission to publish anymore.

You don’t need approval from some executive or editor to share your stories.

AI can help you move faster, research better, publish more.

If you want to write a book in a month instead of a year? These tools make that possible.

I’m Not Just Preaching. I’m Practicing.

I’m finishing the last draft of my next book right now — about how writers can break free from gatekeepers, claim their value, and build seven-figure careers on their own terms.

If you want to be a beta reader and get the book for free, you’ll see exactly how I approach mindset, strategy, marketing, pricing — and the smart ways to use tools like AI to take back control from gatekeepers.

And by the way, yes — I recently crossed the seven-figure mark in my business.

I’m not saying that to brag. I’m saying it because this isn’t theory.

It’s working.

Here’s What Comes Next

This is the most exciting time in history to be a writer. It can also feel like the scariest. That’s normal.

But here’s what I believe:

If you stop thinking of yourself as just a writer and start thinking of yourself as a creative, a strategist, a thinker, you’ll thrive.

Because the title “writer” contains all of those things. These tools are simply here to help you be more of what you already are.

Let’s Do This Together

Here at Make Writing Your Job, I’m going to show you exactly how.

As part of the Sunday newsletter, I’ll be sharing new ideas, prompts, and tutorials about how to use AI without losing your soul.

I’m going to help you work less, publish more, be more creative, and tell the stories that matter.

If you want to come along for the ride, subscribe.

If this isn’t for you, that’s okay — you’re free to unsubscribe.

I’m not here to tell you what you want to hear.

But I’m here to be real with you.

Because I respect you enough for that.

If you’re ready to make writing your job — in the truest, smartest, most sustainable way possible — then let’s go. Together.

Thanks for reading.

-Amy

P.S. Curious about the time savings for writers using AI? I wrote (and researched) this entire piece in less than 90 minutes.