Servant or master?

I open Grammarly and upload a chunk of a chapter, and soon it queries a word I have used. It is an archaic word, but I like it and want to keep it, so I click "dismiss". Moments later, it queries it for a second time, and I again dismiss its suggestion. Then it does it one more time, and again I dismiss it – and it does it again, and I have quickly found myself in a battle of wills with the tool that is meant to be helping me.

Shamefully, I can feel the lazy human in me wanting to click "accept" to make it go away. Grammarly also gives a performance score for the quality of writing in each document and the gamer in me wants to get my overall score close to 100. In that moment, I realise that these artificial intelligence (AI) tools may change – in fact, are changing – the language we use in our books, and even who is the author of a book. With this, I have stepped right into a controversial topic in the writing community – and beyond. After all, the editor and director of the Oscar-nominated film The Brutalist recently caused controversy when the team behind it admitted that AI was used to "enhance" the Hungarian accent taken on by the two lead actors in the film.

I appreciate that the use of AI as a tool for writers is a relatively minor worry in an industry where AI technology to make many people redundant, including authors. Indeed, as I wrote the pitch for this piece my agent received a letter from HarperCollins asking me to allow my book N-4 DOWN to be used to train AI. I refused. For authors, this is a very troubling issue.

AI tools help an author check spelling, punctuation and grammar, speed up research, create more realistic dialogue – and even write better stories. According to Tony Thorne, a language consultant at Kings College London, right now the danger is not only that AI may write like human authors, but that authors will be "nudged" by these tools to write like AI, "using a neutral language that is much less rich and where rewritten texts may lack the writer’s idiolect".

For while these tools are very sophisticated and Thorne "[doesn’t] have any problem" with their use in the early stages of writing a book, they can struggle with replicating overall "style and tone and voice and stance". "I can testify that these are very difficult to teach from human to human, what style is good and what isn’t, and it relies on the incredible sorts of subtleties that only come with consciousness, which they don’t have," Thorne says.

My own experience of Grammarly has made me far more cautious about using these tools in the future, even though their use will become hard to avoid; Microsoft Word keeps suggesting changes as I write this. But what do other authors think?

Clare Buss is non-traditionally published sci-fi and fantasy (SFF) author and deputy editor of Write On! Magazine. "I think AI tools can be a great addition to a writer’s toolkit," she says. "But I’ve never been a quick adopter of anything, so it’s unlikely I’ll dive into actively using AI in my writing."

Librarian and author of the acclaimed YA novel Scareground (Neem Tree Press) Angela Kecojevic has "always viewed" Grammarly as a basic editorial tool and not as an AI assistant like Chat GPT. "Grammarly does offer a sense of security, and it does help tidy up my work,"Angela says. "However, I try to avoid using its suggestions for general text improvement; I think I’m comfortable enough to stick (mostly) with my own choices and not risk messing up my style and voice."

The very fact that most of the authors I approached were willing to talk about using AI tools suggests their use is on its way to becoming more normalised in our community

Other authors have, with a great of deal caution, gone further. "I’m extremely cautious about using AI in any writing process," says Tom Chatfield, tech philosopher and author of Wise Animals (Picador), "partly because all good writing is also rewriting, rethinking and bound up with the struggle to find your own words for things. But I do sometimes make use of LLMs (Large Language Models) to help me ’talk through’ an idea, research, play with ideas, pick holes in my own and others’ work, put myself in readers’ shoes, check I understand something, find a way into a topic, consolidate notes and synopsise others’ work".

One fiction author I spoke to, who didn’t want to be identified, is thinking about trialling an AI app currently under development that will, without the use of the Cloud, analyse a manuscript so that the author can ask what their characters might do in certain situations, resolve plot issues and spot inconsistencies. But it needs very good prompting to come up with useful answers.

Some writers have had a more negative experience of using these tools. "While AI tools can be helpful in synthesising and looking up information, I have used AI tools before to ask for references on specific topics and the responses have been completely wrong, citing real authors but journal titles that simply did not exist," says Melissa Hogenboom, science journalist and author of upcoming Breadwinners (Canongate). "Prompting the AI tool to provide something more accurate didn’t work. This made me realise we cannot depend on these tools for accuracy."

A number of the writers I spoke to felt they lacked the skills to use these AI tools. Others I talked with have stronger views. "I much prefer to analyse research material and write the narrative myself," says historian Helen Fry, author of Women in Intelligence (Yale University Press). "Whilst AI is important for so many fields today, it is important not to lose our cognitive creative skills. If we write our books without the aid of AI, I believe we are giving something special to humanity that is rooted in experience."

AI may well be the future of the publishing industry, says Alex Larman, books editor of the Spectator (world edition) and author of several historical biographies, most recently Power and Glory: Elizabeth II and The Rebirth of Royalty (Weidenfeld & Nicolson), but that does not mean that "real-life, human writers should regard it with anything other than suspicion, even trepidation".

"I’ve never knowingly used any AI tools while researching my books," he tells me, "because I am arrogant – or experienced – enough to believe that I will always have a better connection with my subject than an algorithm can. I have no doubt that AI will change writers’ lives beyond recognition, but am unable to see this as a good thing; instead, I fear that it will steal the soul from this most human of professions".

It is hard to tell how representative this limited sample of authors’ voices is on this topic. Authors of literary fiction may also feel AI has no place in their tool kit. But the very fact that most of the authors I approached were willing to talk about using AI tools suggests their use is on its way to becoming more normalised in our community.

A bestselling non-fiction author I spoke to on condition he wouldn’t be identified goes further. "Every author I knows uses Grammarly and I suspect that most writers are using AI for research, ideas and refining their writing", he tells me. "The stigma associated with using AI tools is disappearing fast".

Another publisher and author I caught up with told me simply that the use of these tools is a necessity. Indeed, The Brutalist has been nominated for 10 Oscars, despite their use of AI. But in the end, it will be readers who decide whether they want their books written by AI, written with the help of AI, stamped guaranteed free of AI or all three. Some may not even care.

Curious, I open Grammarly and click the "write with generative AI feature" and then "identify any gaps". It comes up with four disturbingly decent prompts. I close the app down. What do I do now?