Sandra Wendel - July 9, 2026 - min. read

Can I Use AI to Write and Edit My Book?

This is a trick question. The answer is yes, no, and maybe, but the real question is what using AI costs your voice and credibility. A veteran editor explains where AI helps, where it hurts, and why readers can often spot it faster than you think.

“But I just asked Claude for some ideas, and the writing is really mine.”

No, it’s not. Those are not your ideas. Claude learned from someone (not you), and, believe me, that other author is not happy about Claude sharing their ideas with you. Just ask famous novelist David Baldacci who testified in front of Congress that he asked an AI platform to write in his style, and the response was all his plotlines.

“I just used a few prompts with my ideas, and ChatGPT gave me some outlines to follow.”

Again, Chat is not your friend. Chat and Claude went to the same school, and that’s the school of Not Your Work. Using anything they suggest is as bad as copying off the smart kid’s paper who sat next to you in geometry class in high school.

Do not use artificial intelligence (AI) to write your book in any way. People do. And the world is onto you.

“I put my draft through AI for editing. It found so many errors. I fixed them. I’m not even sure I need an editor at this point. Aren’t they expensive?”

We editors are not worried that AI will replace us. It simply can’t. Perplexity or Grok or Copilot does not know the nuances of our language. AI cannot know that a character on page 156 is the same as the character on page 233 and that you goofed and gave her different colored eyes. AI cannot flag wrong words in the wrong usage. AI might not find the hallucinated citations in your reference section (in fact, AI probably made those up). Or fact check. Or . . .

Not the AI Police

We editors are not the AI police. But we know when you relied on AI in your writing. We know when sections of your book are cleaner than others, when you start using semicolons when you didn’t use them in an earlier part of the book. When your sentences start getting a little different in construction in places. And when a completely bogus citation ends up in your bibliography.

The AI editing process—no matter which platform you choose to use—may not catch errors, but it will introduce new error in the form of if-not-then-that sentences, insert the obscure semicolon, and use red flag words such as delve and foster and unflinching. And fragments. That em-dash thing is old news and not reliable to sniff out AI.

Because so many authors were coming to me with AI-written or AI-assisted manuscripts, I had to get smart about AI. And fast. I immersed myself in a course taught by Erin Servais on AI for Editors. Frankly, I went into the webinars being skeptical about any use of AI and came away with a toolkit for how to use AI—but not for writing and somewhat for editing and clearly for marketing.

Over the past few years and especially within the past year, I have turned away more than a handful of authors who came to me with AI-involved writing. I learned a few truths:

– Authors lie about how much they used AI.

– Authors, editors, book awards, US Library of Congress and the copyright office, Amazon, and the rest of the book industry world need to come to terms with what to use AI for, how to use it, how to tell, and why it does not elevate writing but downgrades it.

– We still have no idea how much AI will impact, change, evolve, or trash writing and books.

How to Use AI in Editing

Aren’t the editing programs editors use really just AI themselves?

Yes, self-editing is important when you are writing. It’s called revision. Sound writing is rewriting say all the successful authors. Nobody writes a perfect manuscript right out of the chute.

But at some point, you cannot see the forest or even the trees in your own work. You want a sharp eye on those typos your brain tricked you into overlooking. You want to be sure your punctuation is correct because it’s been a few decades since high school English class, and you really didn’t pay attention to compound sentences then.

Also, you’re not a book editor. I am. Copilot and Grok and its cousins are not editors either.

Let’s back up a second. Who among us does not use spelling and grammar checkers built into Word? Those words underlined in blue or red? I am Spartacus and so are you. That’s AI flagging stuff the program thinks might be incorrect. Sometimes you did misspell, and sometimes the verb tense was wrong. You looked at the blue underlining, right clicked at the suggestion, and decided yes or no. Did you use AI? Well, yes, sort of.

AI only knows what it knows about language patterns, and, like the rudimentary grammar checker in Word, it is not always correct. I swear to god, if it flags its and wants me to use it’s one more time, I will throw my laptop out the window. Best advice: turn off the grammar checker. I used AI to give us those directions (see the box).

“I bought some expensive software to help me with my writing. Are those AI?”

Enter AI-driven software such as ProWritingAid. Or Grammarly.

ProWritingAid incorporates AI, but it’s not an AI platform such as ChatGPT. It flags your grammar and readability and suggests alternate wording to improve sentences. I don’t recommend using this at all. Of use would be the feature to find overused words. Once you are aware of your writing patterns, you can correct them going forward.

Grammarly checks spelling and punctuation, but is not always correct.

Word itself. If you have Text Prediction and Predictive Text turned on while you are writing, AI is trying to read your mind. Don’t let it. Turn off this feature.

Gemini is built into Google Docs and prompts for rewriting too. Ask Gemini how to turn itself off too.

AutoCrit practically writes your fiction manuscript for you. Again, totally AI and not your work. And possibly someone else’s.

The fine line between writing (because fine writing is rewriting) and editing have never been more blurry when AI is introduced at any step along the way. Where does your writing begin and AI end? What’s yours?

If you use these programs and accept their rewriting suggestions, you are indeed using AI in writing and editing. And that is not acceptable.

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What Have We Learned?

1. Don’t use AI in any capacity when you are writing your book.

2. AI will not replace a human editor.

3. Use AI in highly limited ways such as alphabetizing a reference list and possibly putting your already vetted citations in a style such as APA or Chicago (but check them all again and tell your human editor what you did).

4. Organize a long and complex reference section. But only if you have already fact checked the entries and know they are legit.

5. Create a list of keywords to help you build an index.

6. Print a list of acronyms in a manuscript (PerfectIt offers this as one of the checklist items) if you are creating a glossary.

7. Use AI to give you nuggets of wording or phrases for titles and marketing copy such as the back cover. Don’t upload your entire manuscript into an AI platform because you are giving the monster your precious gem to learn from. Ethical editors won’t do that either. Just give it prompts: “I am writing a book about xxx, and my main points are yyy and zzz. Can you create back cover copy of about 200 tightly written words?”

8. If you use Grammarly or ProWritingAid or similar apps, do not blindly accept their suggestions for edits. Sometimes they are incorrect, and you would be introducing new error. But if you see flags on a usage you seem to use a lot, check a grammar book or website to clarify.

9. Work with a professional editor. Ask the editor to disclose if they use the perfectly acceptable program called PerfectIt (which is not AI) to look for nuances such as a missed closing quotation mark or elusive typos or words hyphenated in one place and not in another. This requires a human editor to make decisions about consistency. Ask if the editor uses any other apps. They should not. You want their eyeballs on your words.

AI in writing and editing is a moving target. By the time you read this post, the landscape will have changed. Again.

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