There are many people touting the benefits of writing a book using an AI tool like ChatGPT or Perplexity, and I cringe every time I come across this advice. It is misguided at best and nefarious at worst, especially for nonfiction books.
As nonfiction authors, we write books to educate, entertain, and inspire readers. We leverage our experiences and expertise to deliver compelling and authoritative books. When you let AI do the heavy lifting by writing your book for you, you introduce all kinds of potential risks and problems and minimize your own credibility.
Could AI help you write your manuscript faster and easier? Possibly. But there are numerous reasons why this is a terrible idea.
Plagiarism Issues Abound with AI
My close friend who is an attorney calls AI “the plagiarization machine.” When you give AI prompts to write your book manuscript (or an article, blog post, or any other content), it’s entirely possible, and even likely, that the output from AI will include entire passages copied from someone else’s work.
The AI models are trained by reading through websites, books, articles, and data that is imported into the system. When you ask an AI tool a question and get an answer back, there is no little man in the computer coming up with a thoughtful answer. The result often comes from several other websites, books, or articles, and the source may or may not be cited properly or mentioned at all. Oftentimes, the results you see are copied word for word from another source.
Recently, I was notified that a member of our Nonfiction Authors Association community had violated copyright protection for another author’s book. More than a dozen passages from Author A’s book appeared verbatim in Author B’s book. I verified this myself and it was astonishing.
When I spoke with author B, she said she was mortified. She wasn’t quite sure how it had happened, though she suspected her developmental editor, who had done extensive work on her manuscript, had created the issue using AI in the writing or editing of the manuscript. This means the AI tool the editor used likely copied entire passages from Author A’s book. This is illegal and can lead to fines and other penalties. This also means the entire book must be taken out of distribution, rewritten, and re-published. What a nightmare.
Your Work Will Be Repurposed and Shared
Conversely, when you upload an article, chapter, or any other content with an AI tool like ChatGPT, by default most tools will take a full copy of your work and use it to train the AI model. This means it’s essentially saving a copy for all eternity, and it never has to cite you as the author.
Once AI has indexed your article, essay, or a chapter from your manuscript, it may get regurgitated and reused when answering other AI users’ questions. Or worse, when someone uses AI to write an article or their own book manuscript (which I do NOT recommend), their output could include entire phrases from the work you uploaded into the system, and you will never get credit for your efforts.
If you ever upload your manuscript or articles to an AI tool, be sure to turn off the setting that tracks your data. In ChatGPT, go to Settings > Data Controls and toggle off “Improve the model for everyone.” By default, this setting is enabled, so anything you have uploaded into it has been indexed, and that is a huge concern for authors.
No Copyright Protection for AI-Generated Text
The powers at Copyright.gov, the official US entity where authors should register for copyright protection for a manuscript, will not issue protection for a book authored with AI. This is likely because nobody can guarantee that the work is original. And without official copyright protection, you cannot pursue legal action if someone pirates your work and publishes it illegally.
Let’s say you use AI to write your book, then discover the entire book has been pirated and published on Amazon under another author’s name. While you can complain to Amazon and hope they take it down, you cannot pursue legal action against that content pirate. Your work is vulnerable because you are unable to register copyright protection for AI-generated books.
AI-Generated Books Lack Integrity
It’s disappointing that so many book coaches and online personalities are recommending writing books with tools that plagiarize other authors’ work and cannot get legal protection. There are books published on how to write a book with AI, and I bet you can guess how those books came into existence. Surely these aren’t based on the author’s vast knowledge, experience, or writing talents. Most of these AI-generated books are opportunistic grabs at a trend covered in dollar signs.
My personal feeling is that nonfiction books should be written with a high level of integrity by the authors who write them and the publishers who publish them. Nonfiction books are impactful on the lives of readers and I take that seriously. And since many of us write nonfiction to share our hard-earned knowledge and experience, the use of AI diminishes the value.
Meanwhile, the romance and mystery book genres are ripe with authors aiming to churn out as many books as possible, and many are turning to AI to get them done quickly. Mystery and romance book readers can consume books like popcorn in a movie theater. They can’t ingest these books fast enough, which means authors in these genres work double time to crank out more books and keep their hungry readers well-fed.
So, mystery and romance authors are incentivized to find shortcuts to produce new manuscripts as quickly as possible. Many books in these genres are formulaic, so using a tool like AI to set out a plot line and characters and do the heavy lifting of writing the text is likely a tremendous time saver. But those books aren’t original, they cannot be copyright protected, and I suspect we are going to see all kinds of lawsuits against these so-called authors. Time will tell.
With all of this said, I think AI can be a fantastic tool for brainstorming and idea generation. Use it to help you come up with title ideas, create an outline, or understand popular keyword searches. You can also use editing tools like Grammarly and ProWritingAid to assist with editing your work, though nothing replaces the experience of a professional human editor.
There are a variety of ways AI tools can be useful to authors. Please just do yourself—and your readers—the favor of writing your own book in your own words.
If you like this blog post, you’ll love our Author Toolkit on writing nonfiction books. It includes checklists, templates, worksheets and more. Check it out!
