{"id":21732,"date":"2025-07-16T10:00:00","date_gmt":"2025-07-16T16:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/?p=21732"},"modified":"2025-07-11T09:56:51","modified_gmt":"2025-07-11T15:56:51","slug":"the-dangers-of-relying-too-much-on-ai","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/the-dangers-of-relying-too-much-on-ai\/","title":{"rendered":"The dangers of relying too much on AI"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<figure class=\"wp-block-embed is-type-video is-provider-youtube wp-block-embed-youtube wp-embed-aspect-16-9 wp-has-aspect-ratio\"><div class=\"wp-block-embed__wrapper\">\n<span class=\"embed-youtube\" style=\"text-align:center; display: block;\"><iframe loading=\"lazy\" class=\"youtube-player\" width=\"750\" height=\"422\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/6aVRQDKJ9Dg?version=3&#038;rel=1&#038;showsearch=0&#038;showinfo=1&#038;iv_load_policy=1&#038;fs=1&#038;hl=en-US&#038;autohide=2&#038;wmode=transparent\" allowfullscreen=\"true\" style=\"border:0;\" sandbox=\"allow-scripts allow-same-origin allow-popups allow-presentation allow-popups-to-escape-sandbox\"><\/iframe><\/span>\n<\/div><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<p>I saw this really interesting video last week, and it made me think: am I relying too much on AI? <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>In my personal life, this probably isn&#8217;t an issue. I do occasionally ask ChatGPT to make me a recipe, or to advise me on a particular topic, but I always do a gut check and assume that it&#8217;s hallucinating if it doesn&#8217;t pass. If it gives me something that I can quickly and easily verify, I always do that\u2026 and half of the time, it turns out to be a hallucination to some degree. So yeah, I don&#8217;t rely on it nearly as much in my personal life as some of the characters in this video.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>What about blogging? Don&#8217;t be too scandalized, but with my new blogging schedule, I have experimented a bit with using ChatGPT to write some of these blog posts. It&#8217;s not like I&#8217;ve been copy-pasting everything straight from the chatbot, but I have relied on it a little more heavily than I do in my own writing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>After trying that a couple of times, though, I decided to cut that out and write all of these blog posts by hand. Why? Because I felt like it was creating too much distance between myself and the people who read this blog, and the purpose for writing this blog is to foster a human connection. So it kind of defeats the purpose to rely on a chatbot to generate most of the content I post here. For that reason, I plan to keep writing all these blog posts entirely myself, with only minimal AI input.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>So what about my fiction? This is where things get a little tricky. While I totally agree that simply copy-pasting from AI is a piss-poor way to write a book, I do think that AI can be a very useful tool in writing and crafting a novel, provided that you understand the limitations of the AI and don&#8217;t rely on it too much. But how much is too much? That is the question.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The biggest way that AI has helped to enhance my own writing is in giving me a birdseye view of the story as I generate a &#8220;crappy first draft.&#8221; This birdseye view allows me to see and fix major story issues before they metastatize and give me writer&#8217;s block, which is what tends to happen if I write these drafts out entirely by hand. When I&#8217;m focused on the page, I tend to lose sight of the forest for the trees, so I don&#8217;t notice that there&#8217;s a problem with the story until I&#8217;m several chapters in and find that I just can&#8217;t write. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>This has happened with basically every project that I write on my own, and is the main reason why it took me anywhere from six to eighteen months (or longer) to write even a short novel, before I started using AI. However, since I began incorporating AI into my writing process, this problem has basically gone away, and I no longer experience this form of writer&#8217;s block at all.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>However, while I do rely on AI to help me to craft my &#8220;crappy first draft,&#8221; that isn&#8217;t the draft that I publish. Once the AI draft is as good as I can make it, I will then go through scene-by-scene and rewrite the entire book in my own words. The purpose for this step is to make sure that I&#8217;m telling the story in my own words, and to make the story my own. I will still have the AI draft open on another screen, and refer to it as I write out the story, but I don&#8217;t do any copy-pasting. It&#8217;s all written out by hand.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Is this enough, though? Or do I need to add more steps to make sure that I&#8217;m not relying too much on AI, and thus losing my own voice? Recently, I&#8217;ve been spending a lot more time on the AI draft, generating multiple iterations and combining the best parts to (hopefully) boost the quality. I&#8217;ve also been doing a revision pass over the AI draft, tweaking it to smooth over some common AI-isms and (hopefully) adding a bit of my own voice before I move on to the human draft and rewrite the whole thing to make sure it&#8217;s all in my voice.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>But while this might be enough to keep the book in my own words, is this enough to keep my own writing skills from atrophying? Or do I need to occasionally pick up a WIP that is 100% human writing, with no AI at all, just to make sure I don&#8217;t lose these writing skills? That is the question that I&#8217;m currently pondering. Perhaps this is the sort of thing that short stories could serve really well to help with. Perhaps I should go back to writing short stories again, just as a way to keep my writing skills sharp.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>If I were starting out right now as a new writer, I would definitely avoid writing with AI until I&#8217;d written enough to find my own voice. And I would also make sure to write at least one novel 100% without AI-assistance, just for the experience, and to prove to myself that I could do it. Otherwise, I think there would be a very real danger in becoming over-reliant on AI to write my books, and thus risk losing my own unique voice, so that none of the books that I write ever truly become my own.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Anyhow, those are some of my current thoughts on the subject. What do you think of this problem?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I saw this really interesting video last week, and it made me think: am I relying too much on AI? In my personal life, this probably isn&#8217;t an issue. I do occasionally ask ChatGPT to make me a recipe, or to advise me on a particular topic, but I always do a gut check and&hellip; <a class=\"more-link\" href=\"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/the-dangers-of-relying-too-much-on-ai\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">The dangers of relying too much on AI<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[170],"tags":[1679,1669,1712,8,599,229,232],"class_list":["post-21732","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-short-stories","tag-ai-assisted-writing","tag-chatgpt","tag-generative-ai","tag-writing-in-general","tag-thoughts-reflections","tag-voice","tag-why-we-write","entry"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p7iXK-5Ew","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21732","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=21732"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21732\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":21733,"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21732\/revisions\/21733"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=21732"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=21732"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=21732"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}