AI is Everywhere But I’m Not Worried

AI is everywhere, right? Aren’t you like me, sick of seeing the posts on Instagram, sick of worrying about potentially having to justify your work is your own? Sick of writers being hounded for potential AI use. Annoyed that these huge companies stole writers work and trained the AI models on it?

For our competition we say in our rules that we do not accept AI writing and will withdraw entries that we suspect have used AI. BUT if we refuse to use technology to check this, which is often unreliable anyway, because we refuse to put writer’s original work into another AI device ,(oh the irony), how do we suspect AI as opposed to human authored writing.

If a machine can produce a thousand words before we have settled on an opening sentence, where does that leave us? Perhaps it leaves us exactly where we have always been searching for the right words. Because producing words and writing are not the same thing.

Let’s look at the difference between human authored and AI writing.

Human writing

The rain started while Mum was washing the dishes. She stood at the sink with her sleeves rolled above her elbows, staring through the window as if someone might appear in the garden.

“Your dad loved this weather,” she said.

I wanted to ask whether she still loved him. Instead, I picked up a tea towel and began drying the plates.

AI writing

Rain tapped gently against the kitchen window as Sarah washed the dishes. She paused, her heart heavy with memories of happier times.

“Your father always loved the rain,” she whispered softly.

Her daughter offered a sad smile and picked up a tea towel. Together, they dried the dishes, finding comfort, connection and healing in the familiar rhythm of the task.

The AI version is perfectly readable.

It also cannot resist telling us absolutely everything.

The memories are happy. The heart is heavy. The smile is sad. The whisper is soft. By the final sentence, we have comfort, connection and healing, because AI is very fond of the rule of three.

Everything comes in threes.

Characters discover hope, strength and resilience.

Journeys are filled with love, loss and transformation.

A cup of tea becomes a moment of warmth, reflection and renewal.

Nobody ever just drinks it because they are thirsty or contemplative or sad or happy or reflective 😊

The rule of three is a useful writing technique. Human writers use it all the time because rhythm matters. But AI often uses it as a ready-made convenience meal you just pop in the microwave and heat up. When every emotion arrives in a neat set of three, prose begins to sound less like a story and more like the final paragraph of a motivational LinkedIn post.

Then there are the metaphors.

AI knows that writing is supposed to sound vivid, so it reaches for imagery:

Her silence was a thunderstorm of forgotten whispers.

What does that actually mean?

How can whispers be forgotten? How can they form a thunderstorm? Is the silence quiet, deafening, threatening or just waiting for somebody to put the kettle on?

Or:

His words shattered the darkness like a river breaking through glass.

A striking image, until you try to picture it.

AI can place poetic words beside one another, but poetic words do not automatically create meaning. A metaphor must do more than sound beautiful. It must help us see, feel or understand something differently and it must have meaning and resonance and we have to be able to picture it.

And then we have those familiar declarations:

She loved him until she didn’t. He was there and then suddenly he wasn’t.

It sounds profound. It looks good on a book graphic. It feels as though it should mean something enormous.

But what does it ACTUALLY tell us?

When did she stop loving him? Was it sudden or gradual? Was it the affair, the final argument or the way he continued to leave wet towels on the bed after twelve years of being asked not to?

“She loved him until she didn’t” gives us the shape of an emotion without the life or emotion or meaning inside it.

A writer searches for the emotional resonance in the moment.

Perhaps she stopped loving him when he laughed at the wrong point in a hospital corridor.

Perhaps she realised it while watching him butter toast.

Perhaps love did not disappear at all. Perhaps it became something smaller, stranger and harder to name.

That is where the story starts to come alive in these small details.

AI writing often explains emotion instead of creating the circumstances in which a reader can feel it. It reaches for what sounds right because it has learned the patterns of language.

A writer asks whether it FEELS right.

Human writing does not tell us that the narrator is sad. It does not tell us that Mum is grieving. It does not offer comfort, connection and healing before the dishes are dry.

It shows the scene on the page and uses sensory language and then leaves a gap for questions to be raised or for the emotion to land so the reader can FEEL something.

Why is Mum staring into the garden?

What happened to Dad?

Why can’t the narrator ask whether she still loves him?

The reader imagines through that gap we as writers create. We bring our own memories, suspicions and fears with us. We do not transcribe the scene for the reader to understand; we show it using visual storytelling techniques and sensory language and sparkling dialogue and subtext so the reader can participate in it.

That is one of the pleasures of human authored writing; our writing: the writer doesn’t hand the reader a labelled emotion. The writer builds a scene, and the reader feels the emotion by interpreting the character’s actions and dialogue and subtext for themselves and FEELING something.

And writing is not only about choosing words. A writer chooses a word, doubts it, deletes it and puts it back. A writer moves a sentence three lines down, reads it aloud, removes a comma, restores the comma and then wonders whether the whole chapter should be written from somebody else’s point of view. A writer agonises. Rewrites. Walks away. Comes back. Then, occasionally, a sentence lands exactly where it should.

You read it again.

Goosebumps.

You think, Oh my God. That’s it. That sentence hit the spot.

AI can’t ever give you that feeling.

It can maybe produce a sentence you like, but it cannot experience the moment of finding it. It has not carried the idea around for three days as you wash up or walk the dog or take the kids to school or WhatsApp your writing friends. It hasn’t struggled with what it wants to say. It doesn’t feel relief when the sentence rhythm finally works or the surprise when a character says something that changes the entire story and you’ve filled your plot hole! It does not sit back from the screen and grin.

As writers we don’t just choose the words. We wrestle with them. Sometimes for days or weeks.

That struggle is not an unfortunate obstacle standing between you and your story. It is part of creating the story. The uncertainty, the false starts and the sentences that refuse to behave are all part of discovering what only you can write.

The same applies to outlines.

Ask AI for a story outline and it will build one from patterns it has already encountered. It can rearrange familiar pieces and present them neatly. It may give you an inciting incident, three escalating obstacles, a midpoint revelation and a satisfying resolution.

Everything will be in the correct box. But it can’t think outside the box, because the box is what it has learned from. It can’t sit with an idea and suddenly realise that the villain should never appear, the love story should remain unresolved, or the ending belongs at the beginning. It cannot have the reckless, inconvenient thought that breaks the structure and makes the story yours and it definitely can’t give you an outline that doesn’t conform to the moulds of fiction already out there. In other words, it can’t think outside the box.

It can give you what usually comes next, asks what could come next. But it can’t ask what WOULDN’T come next and surprise the reader to reverse the obvious.

So yes, AI is everywhere.

But you don’t have to produce words at machine speed. You don’t have to make every sentence polished, uniformed balanced and decorated with three abstract nouns. In fact the aim is to do the absolute opposite. And. no one can tell a story the way you can, in your voice with your view of the world and your experiences and values and belief systems. With YOUR IMAGINATION.

It’s really simple. If you don’t use AI, you don’t need to worry about it.

Take your time. Choose the wrong word. Delete it. Rewrite the sentence. Make a mess. Surprise yourself.

Because isn’t the point of writing the joy we get from actually creating stories?

And for the record, I am never—and I mean never—giving up—in a million years—em dashes!!

Happy Writing!

Sara