Short YouTube short by Julie Broad arguing that AI is a useful assistant for writing (brainstorming, organizing, polishing) but cannot substitute for lived human experience, emotion, and perspective that give memoirs and personal stories their emotional impact. Broad urges authors to use AI for research and outlining while keeping personal stories, lessons, and voice human-authored.
Chapters
AI can write your book. AI generated books are hitting the shelves by the hundreds every day. It's faster, easier, and cheaper. But should you use AI to write your book? Well, AI can brainstorm, organize, and even polish your sentences. But you know what it can't do? It can't live your life, your stories. It can't feel your heartbreak, the betrayal, or the 2am panic that made you want to write that chapter in the first place. One line from my very first book still gets mentioned to me. Sometimes I feel like a job at Starbucks would be better than this. People feel that just like I felt it. AI can't feel, so it's never going to know that feeling. AI is an assistant, but you are the author. Use it to make you faster, clearer, and more creative, but not to replace your perspective. Turning it loose to write this chapter on the frustration you feel when your tenants turn out to be nightmares won't give you the book with the heart and the soul it needs to connect to that reader. But asking it to research 10 true stories on real estate investors that got robbed by their tenant, well, now you start to get somewhere. Being human is your edge. Writing a book AI can write well, anyone can do that. Telling your story of realizing you walked out of your apartment with no pants on. Yeah. And how the wind felt on your legs when you hit the stairwell and realized you had no pants on. Well, that is something only I could tell you about because that happened to me. Readers don't want a perfect book. They want a real one. They want to laugh and cry with the book and go, that made me think or feel something I didn't even know I needed to think or feel. So let AI help you outline. But the stories, the lesson, the perspective, the humanity, that's your job. What do you think? Let's chat about it in the comments.
