10 painful truths about your AI-assisted book manuscript

When I get hired to edit a manuscript these days, the first thing I do is check whether it was created in whole or in part with AI. Around 90% of the book projects I work on now are at least partially AI-assisted. My clients are smart, busy, and tech-savvy, and most of them appear to feel this is saving them time.

They have no idea what their uses of AI are going to cost them.

If you’re already written your manuscript, the insights in this post might help you. If you haven’t, this might make you change the way you approach it.

Ten uncomfortable truths about AI

I’ve now edited a slew of AI-assisted manuscripts. Here’s what I’ve learned about AI that most authors don’t seem to understand:

1. We know where you used AI to write. I use Pangram to check your manuscript. Pangram tells me which parts of are AI-generated, based on the sequences of words that you use. Pangram is not perfect — it does generate false positives. But if it tells me that large parts of your manuscript are AI-generated, it’s likely that they are.
2. AI-generated text is not eligible for copyright. That is the ruling from the US Copyright Office — it is the law regardless of whether you think it’s fair or not. If you can’t copyright your manuscript, no publisher will accept it (and that includes hybrid publishers). You will have to reveal to your publisher what parts are AI-generated, and also make a statement about it in the copyright filing. You can lie, but lying in a copyright application is a federal crime.
3. AI-generated prose is tedious to read. Your reader can tell. AI-generated text tends to be smooth, even, repetitive, and filled with easily recognizable “tells” (and no, I don’t mean em-dashes). If a reader suspects you wrote with AI, they will become annoyed with you. Even if they don’t, they’ll probably get sick of reading what you wrote. You may have saved time, but the AI-generated text in your manuscript makes it less readable.
4. A good editor can help your manuscript, but will charge you more. Many editors have adopted what I call “the Bernoff Premium,” a 50% surcharge for editing AI-generated text. The reason is that it’s much harder for a developmental editor to understand what the text is trying to get across if it’s not written by a human. You’ll be paying more, and the result, even after editing, will be less effective.
5. When you use AI, you’ve diluted your voice. Your book should sound like you. If you let AI write it for you, it sounds like Claude or ChatGPT instead. That’s a huge wasted opportunity for you to connect with the reader in an authentic way.
6. You can’t trust AI, because it makes mistakes. AI invents sources, links to nonexistent references, and fabricates and misattributes quotes. You need to check every fact and quote it gives you, even if it’s quoting interviews you conducted yourself. I’m an editor, not a fact-checker — you cannot pay me to do this. You will either have to hire a fact checker or do it yourself. If those fake facts and inaccurate quotes get into your manuscript, it will be very embarrassing for you and undermine whatever reputational benefit you thought the book would create for you.
7. AI-generated manuscripts have subtle and pernicious problems. Having read a lot of AI-generated material lately, I’ve noticed problems that aren’t well understood. One is the repetition of concepts — AI tends to make the same arguments in similar ways in multiple chapters, which is complicated to untangle. It will glibly steal ideas from other people and include them without attribution, which will make you seem like a rip-off artist. It is fond of clichés and uses mixed and inappropriate metaphors promiscuously, making your writing seem less professional. All of these problems are difficult for editors to spot and fix, especially when those editors have had their minds numbed by AI-generated prose.
8. Rewriting AI-generated text is (and costs) more like ghostwriting. I’ve quoted rewriting jobs in which all I planned to do was rewrite an author’s AI-generated text in other words. Those jobs turned out to be much harder than a simple rewrite. Because AI-generated text has so many problems — and because it often doesn’t accurately reflect the author’s original thoughts — a simple rewrite doesn’t do the material justice. The right thing for an editorial professional to do is to interview the author, understand their ideas and voice, and write the text from that perspective. That’s more like ghostwriting than rewriting, and that is costly.
9. AI wants to please you. Maybe you don’t use AI to write, just to review your writing and make suggestions. Unless you firmly and repeatedly prompt it to be critical, it is likely to lull you into complacency with praise. Before your book is published, you need a hard critic to notice what’s wrong with it and how to fix it, not a cheerleader puffing up your ego.
10. AI graphics are embarrassing and ineffective. AI-generated graphics are far easier to spot than AI-generated prose. They tend to be overly complex, crammed full of text, and way too literal. A good graphic designer can take a rough sketch you make and turn it into a clever illustration that clarifies the book in ways text can’t. An AI-generated graphic is more likely to reiterate concepts in the text in a way that’s not worth the space it takes up.

How smart authors use AI

Reading this, you may think I’m warning you off of AI completely. I’m not. It has great uses, but you need to be smart about it.

Use it for research, but be aware of its tendency to hallucinate.

Use it find problems that you know your prose tends to have, but don’t imagine it can substitute for an experienced editor.

Use it as a thesaurus, but choose words wisely based on what you are trying to get across.

Use it to summarize source materials, but don’t trust its information without checking the original source.

If you use AI as a smart, indefatigable, fallible assistant, it can find connections you’d never imagine and reveal patterns you might not have spotted. It can make you smarter.

But it’s not a good writer — and if you treat it as one, you’ll find the results superficially persuasive but expensive and time consuming to fix.