I first started publishing in 2018, and this is something I could never have predicted having to declare.
I do not use AI to write my books for me.
I’m from a generation when you would write an essay in class with a piece of paper, a pencil, and your brain. Any notion of a machine doing everything for you was seen as science fiction. The big difference now is that I type on the laptop instead of writing by hand. I see no reason why AI should do it for me. The fun of creating a story is the grind of trying to form the pictures and characters’ voices in your head into a working manuscript. Without that, there’d be no point in being an author—at least for me.
There are other reasons I don’t use AI. I could never apply for copyright or offer my books for licensing to AI companies if they were AI. Also, I have legal concerns, considering my books are commercial products. If AI put specific copyrighted terms or phrases in them, I could get into trouble. I didn’t enter this business to be sued for copyright infringement or plagiarism. I could also get accounts with retailers shut down if I lied about how my books were written.
Now, let me address a few things. I write my books in third-person past tense in as deep a POV as I can. I find it the most comfortable style to write in. I also use em dashes, just like the one up a few sentences ago. I went from not understanding how to use them to finding them quite fun to drop in here and there. The random person you watched on the internet who said those things automatically mean a book is AI without further investigation (even if the book was written decades ago) is wrong. You can’t take what everyone on the internet says as Gospel from an Almighty God.
The closest I come to using AI is with Grammarly, ProWritingAid, and Google search. But those are only for edits and research. That is all, and I don’t see myself ever changing my mind.
