The other day I got on a call with a coach I’ve known for years. Smart woman. Built a real business, wrote a real book once, the hard way, the way that takes eighteen months and costs you a little piece of your soul.
This time she’d written a new one in a week and a half.
She told me this the way you’d confess to a speeding ticket—half proud, half bracing for the lecture. “I wrote it with AI,” she said. “But I gave it the outline. I gave it the points. I gave it what I wanted.” And then, before I could say a word: “I took out the stuff I hate. You know. It’s not this, it’s that.“
I do know. God, do I know.
Because here’s what’s happening out there right now, and I say this as someone who watches the publishing world the way other people watch the stock market: everyone is using AI to write their books. Everyone. The coaches, the consultants, the C-suite refugees who paid actual money for a ghostwriter and then tried to cut me out of the loop by feeding their life story to a chatbot at midnight. (What is it with the impatience?!) And almost every one of them arrives at the same humbling little discovery.
They don’t know enough about writing to make it any good.
This is where people get it twisted. The problem isn’t that AI can’t write. AI writes constantly. AI writes with the tireless enthusiasm of a Jack Russell on speed. The problem is that AI writes like AI, and once you learn to see it, you cannot unsee it, and neither can the acquisitions editor you’re hoping to impress.
You know the tells. The construction I now want to set on fire: it’s not X, it’s Y. It’s not a book, it’s a movement. It’s not a diet, it’s a lifestyle. It’s not a sentence, it’s a cry for help.
And quietly. Oh, quietly. Everything happens quietly now. She quietly built an empire. He quietly changed the industry. The word shows up like a fingerprint at a crime scene. When I see “quietly” in a manuscript these days, I want to tell it to fuck off and take its little friend “in a world that…” with it.
The em-dashes breeding like rabbits. The three-item lists where the third item is always a slightly poetic betrayal of the first two. The relentless, exhausting balance of it all, every paragraph weighted and hedged and reassuring, like being comforted by an insurance brochure.
I could go on. I usually do. But I shall resist.
Here’s the part nobody selling you an AI writing course wants to mention: the fact that AI sounds like AI is the best job security you and I have.
The people coming to me right now—the ones penning $75,000 checks without blinking—are largely people who tried it themselves first. They sat down, full of hope, typed “write my book about leadership,” and got back four hundred pages of grammatically flawless nothing. Technically accurate. Emotionally barren–think Mongolian steppe, Siberian tundra, that sort of thing. The financial-advisor-writing-like-a-textbook problem, except now it’s automated and available in bulk.
They read it. They felt the wrongness of it, even if they couldn’t name it. And they came looking for the person who could.
Because knowing that a chapter is dead on the page is a skill. Knowing why—that’s a bigger one. And knowing how to reach in and resuscitate the thing, to make it sound like a human being with a pulse and a point of view actually wrote it? That’s the whole job. That’s the part the machine can’t hand you, because you can’t shape what you can’t hear.
I’m not one of these people clutching my pearls about the death of the written word. AI is a tool. I use it. You should too. But you have to use it the way a good carpenter uses a nail gun—which is to say, you have to already know how to build the house.
The thing is, you still have to know what a good sentence sounds like, so you can tell when you’re not getting one. You still have to know your own voice cold, so you can catch the moment the draft stops sounding like you and starts sounding like a LinkedIn post that gained sentience. You still have to be willing to take the whole competent, lifeless paragraph and cut it, and write the true thing instead—the thing you swore you’d never tell anyone, the thing that makes the reader recognize themselves and cry a little. AI will never volunteer that juicy goodness.
The work, in other words, hasn’t changed. It’s just wearing a disguise.
So before you get too pleased with yourself for writing a book in a week and a half, ask the question I ask every client who tries to sneak the machine past me: Would you be embarrassed if someone who actually reads for a living could tell?
Because they can tell. My friend at the Hay House acquisitions desk can spot it from across a crowded inbox. (If you could just hear some of the conversations we have about this, your hair would curl.) Your ideal client, the discerning one, the one who makes your heart flutter and pays your invoice without flinching—she can feel it too, even if she’d never use the word “cadence.” She just knows the book left her cold. She just knows she doesn’t quite trust it. And there goes your fourth pillar, the respect one, collapsing into a pile of rubble and taking your credibility with it.
The machine can get you to a draft. It cannot get you to good. And it certainly can’t get you to you.
That last mile? Still ours. Thank God.
